Chuq Von Rospach on the State of the Mac ★

Chuq Von Rospach:

I long ago got used the the idea that no matter what Apple said or released, the Internet would fall over itself proving how much smarter they were than Apple, only to see Apple make another truckload of money on the product everyone was criticizing.

That said, this event’s criticism has been louder and more widespread and angrier than I remember seeing for a long time. I finally had to basically unplug for a while because I found myself getting into the “someone is wrong on the internet” mentality.

Writing my piece over the weekend was about as difficult as anything I’ve ever written because there are a lot of legitimate gripe points with Apple right now, but so much of what’s being thrown around is trivial and petty and often outright wrong, or just plain silly.

A lot of it boils down to this concept: We demand Apple innovate, but we insist they don’t change anything.

Best piece I’ve seen on last week’s announcements.

Monday, 31 October 2016

Apples vs. Oranges — Thick, Heavy Oranges ★

Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews on Ubuntu PC-maker System76 seeing a surge of traffic after last week’s MacBook Pro announcements:

Alternatively, I headed to System76 and configured its 15-inch Oryx Pro (you can do so here). I closely matched the MacBook Pro specs, with a Quad-core Sklyake i7 and NVMe 256GB SSD. Instead of 16 GB of RAM as found on the Apple, I configured with 32 GB (you can go up to 64 GB if needed). By default, it comes with a 6 GB Nvidia GTX 1060. The price? Less than $2,000! In other words, the System76 machine with much better specs is less expensive than Apple’s.

Obviously we aren’t comparing apples to apples (pun intended). If you absolutely need macOS for certain software or licenses, an Ubuntu machine will not meet your needs. Also, the System76 machine does not have Apple’s revolutionary Touch Bar.

Still, the Oryx Pro can be configured with specs far beyond the MacBook Pro, and at a very competitive price — it is not hard to see why System76 saw a huge jump in traffic following the Apple Keynote. It is worth noting that both the Oryx Pro and MacBook Pro can run Windows too.

There is a catch. The 15-inch Oryx Pro is 1-inch thick and weighs 5.5 pounds. The new 15-inch MacBook Pro is 0.6 inches thick and weighs 4 pounds. I’m not slamming the Oryx here — there are plenty of performance-hungry Mac users who wish that Apple made a MacBook this thick and heavy if it meant they could install up to 64 GB of RAM and had all the ports they wanted built-in. (I will add that the Oryx is ugly as sin, and doesn’t have a retina-resolution display. Here I am slamming it.)

But the price you pay for the MacBook Pro isn’t about the sum of the components. It’s about getting them into that sleek, lightweight form factor, too. In a word, Apple is optimizing the MacBook lineup for niceness. That’s frustrating — in some cases, downright angering — for people who want a notebook optimized for performance.

Translation From Apple Lingo to English of Tim Cook’s Year-Ago ‘Why Would You Buy a PC Anymore?’ Comment ★

This year-ago quote from Tim Cook in an interview with The Telegraph, in the wake of the launch of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, is getting a lot of circulation this week:

“I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?”, asks Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, who has just flown into Britain for the launch of the iPad Pro. […]

“Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones,” Cook argues in his distinctly Southern accent (he was born in Alabama).

People are pointing to this as proof that Tim Cook doesn’t care about the Mac, because he thinks everybody should just switch to an iPad Pro. But here’s the thing, in Apple lingo, the Mac is not a “PC”. A “PC” is a personal computer that runs Windows or Linux or whatever. I’m not splitting hairs here — this is how people inside Apple talk. It’s right there in the opening lines of the years-long “Get a Mac” ad campaign (66 ads!) — “I’m a Mac…”, “… and I’m a PC.”

The second paragraph above shows the difference. In the first paragraph, Cook is questioning why anyone would buy a (Windows/Linux) PC. In the second, he’s saying many people don’t even need a notebook or desktop, period, implicitly including Mac notebooks and desktops. This is true for many people, probably even true for “many, many” people, as Cook says. But even “many, many” is not “most”.

You can argue the sorry state of the Mac hardware lineup is proof that Cook doesn’t properly value the Mac. If this goes on much longer, it’s an unavoidable conclusion. You can also argue, quite possibly correctly, that Cook is too bullish on the iPad. But Cook’s “Why would you buy a PC anymore?” question is only a slam against computers other than Apple’s.

Note too: Tim Cook has an iMac on his desk.

Who’s to Blame for the 16 GB RAM Limit on the New MacBook Pros: Apple or Intel? ★

“Exploding_m1”, in a thread on Reddit:

The true reason behind the lack of 32 GB or DDR4 is Intel. Skylake does not support LPDDR4 (LP for low power) RAM. Kabylake is set to include support, but only for the U category of chips. So no LPDDR4 support for mobile until 2018 I think.

One example is the Dell XPS 13. On the Dell XPS 13 version, you cannot go for 32 GB of RAM. Meanwhile, the 15 inches does give you that option, but you have to sacrifice battery life for it.

From what Apple told me last week, I believe this is true. You can certainly argue with the design of the new MacBook Pros — and many are. The argument against this design is that it’s backwards — that for MacBooks targeting pro users, Apple should start with high performance specs and then build a machine that supports things like 32 GB of RAM. If they had done that, they’d have wound up with thicker, heavier designs. Many actual pro users would be delighted by that.

Apple simply places a higher priority on thinness and lightness than performance-hungry pro users do. Apple is more willing to compromise on performance than on thinness and lightness and battery life. Intel just doesn’t make the chips that Apple needs.

This is why Apple designs its own chips for iOS. You don’t see people complaining that the iPhone or iPad Pro are underpowered. In fact, they’re faster than their competition. (The iPhone 7 has a single-core Geekbench 4 score that is double that of the Google Pixel.) With iPhones and iPads, Apple makes them ever thinner and lighter and yet they still offer industry-leading performance. We’ve all been speculating for years that Apple might start designing its own chips for Macs. At this point it looks like they have to do it. If anything, these new MacBook Pros were overdue — they arrived late and Intel still doesn’t have the chips Apple really needs.

Intel is designing its chips for an industry that does not share Apple’s obsession with thinness and lightness.

Michael Tsai’s Roundup of Commentary on the New MacBook Pros and the State of the Mac ★

Dozens and dozens of links here. Rather astounding how much backlash last week’s event has generated. I can’t recall an Apple event that generated such a negative reaction from hard-core Mac users. I’m working on a longer piece with my full thoughts on what’s going on, but for now, Tsai’s list of links is must-read stuff.

Saturday, 29 October 2016

Pearl RearVision ★

My thanks to Pearl for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Upgrade your car with Pearl RearVision, the wireless backup camera and alert system that works with your smartphone. Developed by former Apple engineers, it installs on your car in minutes with no costly professionals or dealers required. It’s very clever — it’s just a simple license plate frame. It communicates wirelessly and gets power from solar charging.

See around corners with the two HD cameras which also provide super-wide views of what’s behind you, and the ability to pan 180 degrees in any direction. RearVision also features obstacle detection, giving you visual and audible alerts before your parallel parking job turns into an insurance claim.

Pearl is offering free two-day shipping for a limited time, so order now at pearlauto.com.

On Hiding vs. Encapsulating Complexity, in the Context of Twitter’s Experimental Reply Interface

Friday, 28 October 2016

Matthew Panzarino hits today’s DF trifecta with this piece railing against a confusing new reply interface Twitter is testing with some users:

The solution for this mess should probably start with removing the user names from the character count but leaving the actual user names themselves. Much in the way that a link (eventually, still not implemented, lol) or photo is added and appears in the tweet but does not count towards the character count.

The argument against this is that ‘normals are confused by ‘@ names’. I disagree. I think that this may have been an issue early on but enormous swaths of people have been familiarized with usernames by the huge audience for tweets on mainstream media, TV and the web, as well as in pop culture like Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets segments and on and on.

Twitter reply chains are confusing to some/many users. Is the problem with Twitter, or with the users?

The fundamental problem with most designers of complex systems intended for mass market use is that they decide to hide complexity. They won’t admit it — they’ll deny it even — but it’s because they’re disdainful of their users. They think their users are stupid, so they need to present them with a design for stupid people. If they weren’t stupid they wouldn’t be confused, right?

That’s fundamentally wrong. If people are confused with a design, the problem is with the design, not with the users. It’s Twitter’s designers who aren’t smart enough, not Twitter’s users, because if Twitter’s designers were smart enough, they’d come up with a design that wasn’t confusing by encapsulating rather than merely hiding complexity. It’s the difference between actually cleaning up a mess versus just sweeping the mess under a rug. This new Twitter reply interface is a “sweep it under the rug” design.

A good “simple” design will help users to understand what is actually going on, how a thing actually works. A bad “simple” design will leave users just as confused as ever with even less chance of figuring it out, because what they need to see to understand it is hidden.¹ ★

Apple has always been very good at this — designing software and hardware where complexity is encapsulated rather than hidden. The genius of the original Mac wasn’t that it was suitable for dummies but that it was the first system that wasn’t confusing. Smart people flocked to the Mac.

But an example where Apple got this wrong is the way Mac OS X (to use the old name) defaults to hiding file name extensions. This is a pet topic of mine from the earliest days of Daring Fireball. If you’re going to require file name extensions in your system, then show them. If you don’t want to show them (and you shouldn’t, because they’re ugly, inelegant, and easily broken), then design a system where they’re never needed. The classic Mac OS got this right. iOS got this right. Mac OS X got this wrong, and it’s still a bit of a mess on today’s MacOS. ↩︎

Friday, 28 October 2016

The Touch Bar T1 Chipset Contains an ARM CPU and Secure Enclave ★

Matthew Panzarino, again:

When will Apple ship a MacBook with an ARM processor? This is a question that has been top of mind for observers of the company ever since it started designing and building its own chips from the ground up.

The answer to that question is now, sort of. Apple’s new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models come equipped with a Touch Bar — that bar and the accompanying Touch ID sensor are powered by both the Intel processor at the core of the laptop and an Apple designed T1 chip.

The T1 consists of the processor in the Apple Watch’s S2 and the Secure Enclave.

This is an oversimplification, but effectively the Touch Bar is an iOS device — a little computer in a big computer.

Why Apple’s MacBook Touch Bar Was the Right Thing to Do ★

Matthew Panzarino:

People love a Greek tragedy. Icarus has flown too close to the sun and tumbled to Earth. Apple has forgotten its core users and been eclipsed by Microsoft. The Touch Bar is a compromise between adding a touch screen on a MacBook and ignoring touch entirely.

These narratives are easy to sketch because they sell better to readers than moderated, honest inspection of sentiment and behavior. If you have heroes and villains, then everything is a zero-sum game and nothing that competitors do can exist on their own merits.

The MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar is the right thing to do because people don’t use touch screen laptops like they do tablets.

Some people are adamant in their belief that MacBooks should and/or will eventually have touch screens, but I remain convinced that they should not and never will. Ergonomically, a vertical (or nearly vertical) display is not comfortable for touch. And even more important, MacOS was designed for a mouse pointer. That’s fundamentally different from touch. MacOS is no better suited to touch than iOS is suited to support for a mouse or trackpad pointer. (I’d even argue that touch support on the Mac would be even clunkier than mouse support on iOS.)

The Touch Bar is not the answer to “How do we bring touchscreens to the Mac?”, because that question is not actually a problem. The Touch Bar is the answer to “These keyboard F-keys are cryptic and inflexible — what can we replace them with that’s better?” That’s an actual problem.

I tried out a Surface Studio in Microsoft’s San Francisco store (in the Westfield Mall) yesterday evening. It’s an interesting machine, as well-built as promised. And I do think it might prove useful and very popular with people who draw professionally. Most people don’t draw professionally, though. And using a pen or fingers on a mouse pointer-based OS remains as clunky as ever. Also, for what it’s worth, drawing latency on the Studio is OK, but not as good as on an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. And there’s noticeable parallax between the glass surface and the actual pixels of the display.

Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race ★

Julia Angwin and Terry Parris Jr., reporting for ProPublica:

The ad we purchased was targeted to Facebook members who were house hunting and excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people. (Here’s the ad itself.)

When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 makes it illegal “to make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.” Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

Very surprising that a company that claims “diversity” justifies keeping prominent Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel on its board of directors would have a blatantly racist advertising policy.

Update: Their filter lets you screen out Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Hispanics, but it doesn’t let you screen out white people? How did anyone at Facebook think this was a good idea?

Thursday, 27 October 2016

Why Isn’t Netflix Part of Apple’s New TV App? ★

Pavan Rajam:

As for why Netflix is opting out of this app, I have 2 theories:

Netflix views usage data as highly confidential, proprietary information. They don’t even share this data with their show creators, so there’s no way in hell they would share this data with a partner who, it could be argued, is trying to disintermediate them.

Netflix also doesn’t need help curating and personalizing their content library, they are already the best in the industry. Almost all of the other video apps need all the help they can get.

I suspect this is exactly right. Netflix doesn’t need Apple’s TV app to surface/suggest their content, and they almost certainly don’t want to share usage data with Apple.

Update: I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple and Netflix get this worked out. Netflix gave a statement to Wired saying they’re “evaluating the opportunity”:

Netflix comes as a bit of a surprise, though, as it’s long been a stalwart of streaming boxes, and was previously a participant in Apple TV’s universal search feature. The service didn’t appear in Apple’s presentation today, though, and the company has confirmed that it won’t be involved, at least at launch. “I can confirm we are not participating and evaluating the opportunity,” says Netflix spokesperson Smita Saran.

Developer Documentation for Touch Bar ★

The Human Interface Guidelines are an interesting read.

In person, the Touch Bar looks and feels great. I’m unusually excited about this.

Wednesday, 26 October 2016

The Talk Show: ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma Multitasking’ ★

Special guest John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include what we expect from tomorrow’s Apple Event for new Mac hardware, and my impressions of the Google Pixel phone after a week using one.

This week’s show introduces chapter marks for subject matter. If you use a podcast player that supports them, such as Overcast, let me know what you think.

Tuesday, 25 October 2016

Six Colors’ Coverage of Apple’s Q4 Results and Analyst Call ★

Charts and graphs, and snap coverage of Apple’s analyst conference call.

Apple Q4 2016 Results ★

Pretty much in line with expectations.

Images of New MacBook Pro With Magic Toolbar Leaked in MacOS Sierra 10.12.1 ★

Something something doubling down on secrecy.

Noteworthy: there is no hardware Esc key.

iPhone 7 Plus’s Portrait Mode in Real Life ★

Nice collection of iPhone 7 Plus portrait mode photos submitted by iMore readers.

HomeKit’s Stringent Security Requirements ★

Here’s a report by Aaron Tilley for Forbes, from July of last year:

It’s been more than a year since Apple announced HomeKit, its system for connecting smart home devices through iOS. And as with all things Apple, expectations are high. Maybe too high.

So far, only five companies have launched HomeKit-certified smart home devices. What’s the hold up? Apple has thrown a plethora of challenges at hardware makers, and some developers say one of the biggest is complying with Apple’s strict security requirements on Bluetooth low energy devices.

Apple allows for either WiFi or Bluetooth low energy (LE)-enabled devices to get certified as a HomeKit accessory. Apple is requiring device makers using both WiFi and Bluetooth LE to use complicated encryption with 3072-bit keys, as well as the super secure Curve25519, which is an elliptic curve used for digital signatures and exchanging encrypted keys.

“These security protocols are bleeding edge,” said Diogo Monica, a security lead at Docker and an IEEE security expert.

This story makes more sense today, given all the recent outages and attacks based on exploits of insecure “internet of things” devices.

On iMessage’s Stickiness

Monday, 24 October 2016

Lauren Goode, writing for The Verge a few weeks ago, “iMessage Is the Glue That Keeps Me Stuck to the iPhone”:

As someone who vacillates between iOS and Android fairly often, but who considers a lightly cracked iPhone 6S her daily driver, I’m also considering whether the Pixel phone is the next phone to buy. All of the software I use now is available on Android: all of my top email, calendar, music, fitness, photography, task-based, work collaboration, and social networking apps are there.

But one app is not, and that’s iMessage.

There is a lot of truth here, especially for people who are largely in the Google ecosystem for email, calendaring, photos, etc. A lot of them use iPhones with Google apps, not Android phones. I know several people who think iPhones are better client devices for Google’s ecosystem than Android devices running Google’s own operating system. In particular, I think this is very common in Silicon Valley. I notice it frequently when I see the homescreens on iPhones used by members of the press who cover the wider industry (as opposed to those who focus more on Apple). That’s who I think Google’s Pixel phones are aimed at: not the mass market, per se, but the technical elite who are currently using a lot of Google services on iPhones. Another way to put it: if the Pixels don’t get Google employees who use iPhones to switch, nothing will.

See, for example, this year-old BuzzFeed column by Charlie Warzel, “Apple’s Junk Drawer Problem”:

There’s a folder on the homescreen of my iPhone affectionately labeled “Apple Crap.” Inside, a colony of flattened, painstakingly designed app icons gather dust. With the exception of the Health and Podcast apps, I’ve become accustomed to relegating Apple’s (undeletable) native apps to the junk drawer. The containment strategy started back in 2012, when Apple Maps suggested I head to a work meeting in the middle of the Hudson River, and I’ve never looked back. An informal office poll also concluded that I’m not alone. We’ll wait hours in line in the cold/heat/rain/snow for a shiny new piece of Apple hardware — but once we get it, the first thing we do is fill it with third-party services, leaving Apple’s proprietary apps tucked away in lonely folders on third or fourth screens.

That doesn’t sound like a typical iPhone user, who is likely to use all or most of Apple’s built-in apps. Apple Maps, for example, is far more popular on iOS than Google Maps. But Warzel’s description sounds exactly like the sort of iPhone users who might be tempted by the Pixel. There’s a split between iPhone users who are primarily part of the Apple ecosystem (iCloud, Safari, Apple Mail, …) and those who are part of the Google ecosystem (Google Drive, Google Calendar, Chrome, Gmail, …).

iMessage is an exception. With iMessage you get to connect both with iPhone users in the Google ecosystem and iPhone users in the Apple ecosystem. For a lot of us here in the U.S., that’s just about everyone we know. It’s no coincidence that two of Google’s major Android initiatives this year are Allo and Duo, their answers to iMessage and FaceTime. I don’t think it’s going to work. iPhone users on the Google ecosystem might install Duo and Allo, and those who switch to Pixel phones will have them installed by default. But I don’t see why iPhone users on the Apple ecosystem will install either Duo or Allo in large enough numbers to make a difference. Anyone who switches to a Pixel phone from an iPhone is still going to miss iMessage and FaceTime.

iMessage and FaceTime are tied to the same Apple ID system, but there’s a subtle difference between their rises in popularity. iMessage gained traction by replacing SMS — you just did what you used to do before iMessage existed and the messages went over iMessage instead of SMS if both people were signed into iCloud. The way Apple usurped SMS for their own users and let SMS remain as a fallback for texting with everyone else was simply genius.

FaceTime, on the other hand, introduced something new: low-latency, high-quality video chat. FaceTime wasn’t the first video chat to exist, but it was the first one to matter in the mass market. I’ve lost track of the TV shows and movies where I’ve seen characters using FaceTime, often mentioning it by name. FaceTime is a meaningful part of the lives of millions of families.

Back to Goode:

Back in June, when Apple showed off a bunch of new iMessage features and said it would be opening up iMessage to third-party app developers, some people wondered whether the company would go even a step further and bring iMessage to Android phones. It was a valid question in the “who-really-knows-what-Apple-will-do” sense, but still, the idea made little sense to me. Of course Apple wasn’t going to allow iMessage to function on Android: iMessage is the glue that keeps people stuck to their iPhones and Macs.

The iMessage-for-Android rumor was started by MacDailyNews, and while I wouldn’t have bet on it, I wasn’t entirely dismissive. I still think it might happen sooner or later. Here’s what I wrote in June:

It’s a little surprising if true, but remember that Apple is now boasting about its prowess as a services company. Messaging is a service. And it makes even more sense if, as rumored, there’s a payments component coming to iMessage.

I’ve heard from little birdies that mockups of iMessage for Android have circulated within the company, with varying UI styles ranging from looking like the iOS Messages app to pure Material Design.¹ iMessage for Android may never see the light of day, but the existence of detailed mockups strongly suggests that there’s no “of course not” to it.

As an iOS/MacOS exclusive, iMessage is a glue that “keeps people stuck to their iPhones and Macs”, not the glue. iMessage for Android would surely lead some number of iPhone users to switch to Android, but I think that number is small enough to be a rounding error for Apple. Apple wins by creating devices and experiences that people want to use, not that they have to use. Apple creates desire, not obligation. If the iPhone isn’t thriving simply by being the best, then Apple is already in deep trouble. I would argue that in some ways Apple might be better off releasing iMessage for Android, simply to remove a crutch.²

But for a company that has failed at most attempts to create social networks, Apple has inadvertently built one with all of those little blue bubbles.

There’s nothing inadvertent about iMessage’s success. ★

Apple Music for Android, for example, is very Material Design-y. It uses Android’s system font, the Android standard hamburger menu for the sidebar, Android’s sharing menu icon, Android-style navigation controller transition animations, and more. I may not be well-enough attuned to idiomatic Android UI design to notice where Apple Music is iOS-y, but I can categorically state that Apple Music for Android is far more Android-y than any of Google’s iOS apps are iOS-y. ↩︎
Every time I bring up FaceTime, at least one reader will pipe up asking about Steve Jobs’s on-stage promise at its premiere in 2010 to release FaceTime as an “open standard”. That went wrong two ways. First, the story I’ve been told is that releasing FaceTime as an open standard was a decision Jobs made unilaterally while working on the 2010 WWDC keynote. The FaceTime engineering team learned about it when we did — when Jobs promised it on stage. It wasn’t designed or engineered from the outset to be open, and so even under the best of circumstances, it might have taken years for FaceTime to go open. But even worse, Apple lost a patent lawsuit over FaceTime that required them to change FaceTime’s architecture.

So I don’t think we’re ever actually going to see FaceTime as an open standard. But I think the sentiment that drove Jobs to want it to be an open standard applies to the idea of releasing iMessage for Android. Apple doesn’t need to rely on platform-exclusive lock-in. ↩︎︎

Monday, 24 October 2016

Messaging Systems That Support Both E2E Encryption and Multiple Devices ★

On Twitter, Robin Malhotra made an observation that I’d never really considered, nor recall anyone else observing, but which seems to me a very big deal: that iMessage is the only major messaging service that supports both end-to-end encryption and multiple devices. Even Google’s brand-new Allo does not support multiple devices (and only uses encryption for “incognito” chats).

Multi-device support is essential to my use of iMessage.

Update: Wire is another chat service that supports multiple devices and uses end-to-end encryption everywhere.

Brian Moore on iPhone 7 Plus Portrait Mode ★

Brian Moore:

Portrait Mode is definitely not perfect! Straight lines and crisp edges in the foreground are Portrait Mode’s greatest difficulty. But, on the flip side, the effect is applied quickly, and seems to focus on exactly the plane I want it at. Plus, its “stepping” between objects in the foreground and background is really impressive. People have asked me what camera I used to take these photos, which is I’d call a good sign. I like how they look, and this is a camera I can keep in my pocket all day as I walk all over a beautiful country. That’s a win for me.

Some terrific examples — both good and bad. When it works well, it’s the colors as much as the depth effect that make these look like they were shot on film.

Clarity ★

Robert Scoble:

The next iPhone will be, I am told, a clear piece of glass (er, Gorilla Glass sandwich with other polycarbonates for being pretty shatter resistant if dropped) with a next-generation OLED screen (I have several sources confirming this). You pop it into a headset which has eye sensors on it, which enables the next iPhone to have a higher apparent frame rate and polygon count than a PC with a Nvidia 1080 card in it. […]

The clear iPhone will put holograms on top of the real world like Microsoft HoloLens does.

Take a look at iFixit’s teardown of an iPhone 7. Just look at the battery alone. The only way I can see that a 2017 iPhone could be transparent would be if Apple invents a time machine that allows them to borrow technology from 2035 or so.

IBM: Macs Are Less Expensive Than PCs ★

Jeni Asaba, writing for Jamf:

In 2015, IBM let their employees decide — Windows or Mac. “The goal was to deliver a great employee choice program and strive to achieve the best Mac program,” Previn said. An emerging favorite meant the deployment of 30,000 Macs over the course of the year. But that number has grown. With more employees choosing Mac than ever before, the company now has 90,000 deployed (with only five admins supporting them), making it the largest Mac deployment on earth.

But isn’t it expensive, and doesn’t it overload IT? No. IBM found that not only do PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive. That’s right, depending on the model, IBM is saving anywhere from $273 - $543 per Mac compared to a PC, over a four-year lifespan. “And this reflects the best pricing we’ve ever gotten from Microsoft,” Previn said. Multiply that number by the 100,000+ Macs IBM expects to have deployed by the end of the year, and we’re talking some serious savings.

IBM as the world’s largest Mac installation is such a great story.

Qualcomm vs. Intel iPhone 7 Cellular Modems ★

Cellular Insights:

In all tests, the iPhone 7 Plus with the Qualcomm modem had a significant performance edge over the iPhone 7 Plus with the Intel modem. We are not sure what was the main reason behind Apple’s decision to source two different modem suppliers for the newest iPhone. Considering that the iPhone with the Qualcomm modem is being sold in China, Japan and in the United States only, we can not imagine that modem performance was a deciding factor. When all said and done, the iPhone 7 Plus is a beautifully designed smartphone, with arguably the best-in-class camera and system performance. It’s also the best iPhone ever. We hope that next year’s iPhone delivers best-in-class LTE performance.

In the U.S., you get the Qualcomm modem if you order an iPhone for use on Verizon or Sprint, and the Intel modem for AT&T and T-Mobile. That’s because Intel’s modem doesn’t support CDMA, which Verizon and Sprint still use.

Update: Color me a little skeptical that this disparity is evident in real-world use. Shouldn’t we be hearing more complaints about LTE performance on these iPhones?

The 20 CDs Curated by Steve Jobs and the Original iPod Team ★

Nobuyuki “Nobi” Hayashi, recalling the introduction of the original iPod 15 years ago this week:

Steve Jobs insisted that Apple has no intention of stealing away the sales of the music industry; remember this was way before iTunes Music Store. What Apple did to keep its word is buying same number of 20 CDs sets and gave it along with the iPod prototypes to the journalists.

It has been 15 years since then, and I thought I have lost them. But recently, as I was moving to a new house, I have found that set (shrink wrapped).

Below you will find the list of those 20 CDs which was carefully selected by Steve Jobs and the original iPod team (lead by Stan Ng). Enjoy!

That was a year before I started writing Daring Fireball.

Google Assistant vs. Siri Head-to-Head ★

Marques Brownlee pits Google Assistant (on a new Pixel) against Siri (on a new iPhone 7). Siri does quite well.

Seth Godin on the State of Apple’s Software ★

Seth Godin:

Over the last five years, Apple has lost the thread and chosen to become a hardware company again. Despite their huge profits and large staff, we’re confronted with (a partial list):

Automator, a buggy piece of software with no support, and because it’s free, no competitors.

Keynote, a presentation program that hasn’t been improved in years.

iOS 10, which replaces useful with pretty.

iTunes, which is now years behind useful tools like Roon.

No significant steps forward in word processing, spreadsheets, video editing, file sharing, internet tools, conferencing, etc. Apple contributed mightily to a software revolution a decade ago, but they’ve stopped. Think about how many leaps forward Slack, Dropbox, Zapier and others have made in popular software over the last few decades. But it requires a significant commitment to keep it moving forward. It means upending the status quo and creating something new.

This doesn’t resonate for me. I think it’s the same basic gut feeling that drove Marco Arment’s widely-read “Apple Has Lost the Functional High Ground” essay two years ago. Marco’s piece was more about bugs and quality, and Seth’s is more about creativity, but underlying it all, I think, is the vague sense that all software is shitty.

And it is! Here’s Dave Winer from all the way back in 1995:

An old software slogan at Living Videotext: “We Make Shitty Software… With Bugs!” It makes me laugh! We never ran this slogan in an ad. People wouldn’t understand. But it’s the truth. We make shitty software. And so do you!

Software is a process, it’s never finished, it’s always evolving. That’s its nature. We know our software sucks. But it’s shipping! Next time we’ll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that’s perfect is one you’re dreaming about. Real software crashes, loses data, is hard to learn and hard to use. But it’s a process. We’ll make it less shitty. Just watch!

Software, in general, is much better than it used to be. Unlike 1995, we don’t lose data due to bugs very often. (For me personally, I can’t even remember the last time I lost data.) But our hardware is so much better than our software, the contrast is jarring. An iPhone is a nearly perfect object. Sleek, attractive, simple. The hardware is completely knowable — there are only five buttons, each of them easily understood. iOS, however, is effectively infinite. The deeper our software gets, the less we know and understand it. It’s unsettling.

I do think Apple could be doing better with software, but I don’t think the problem has anything to do with the company being institutionally focused on hardware. And I think it’s easy to discount the great new software Apple has created in the last five years: iMessage and FaceTime, to name two that fit squarely in Godin’s list of areas where Apple has made “no significant steps forward”.

Om Malik: ‘Good Design — Inside and Out’ ★

Om Malik, writing last week for The New Yorker:

When I asked John Maeda, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, why, then, people have turned on the design of the iPhone 7, he pointed out that perhaps these critics “seem to believe that there’s some as yet unimaginable transcendence that can happen in a small, palm-shaped, rectangular device.” Maeda said that he spent time with designers at Sony and felt their frustration designing a television set “because all you can really do is design the rectangle that the TV sits within.… Everything else around that screen really doesn’t matter.” The same problem holds for the iPhone. All that matters is the screen — its size, brightness, and resolution. “Now that we have all those dimensions sated, it’s basically the challenge of designing a TV set all over again,” he added.

The New York Times Is Buying the Wirecutter for More Than $30 Million ★

Peter Kafka, reporting for Recode:

The New York Times is buying The Wirecutter, a five-year-old online consumer guide. The Times will pay more than $30 million, including retention bonuses and other payouts, for the startup, according to people familiar with the transaction.

Brian Lam, a former editor at Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, founded The Wirecutter in 2011, and has self-funded the company’s growth. […]

Both sites make their money via affiliate links, which generate revenue when consumers click on them and make purchases via e-commerce sites like Amazon.

Sounds like a good deal for everyone involved. Lam’s success is well-deserved.

Saturday, 22 October 2016

Squarespace Domains ★: My thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. As some of you might know, Squarespace recently launched its own domains product. It’s called Squarespace Domains, and it turns the ugliest aspects of buying domains into a simple, modern experience. It’s also the first registrar to offer transparent pricing, flat rates, and free WHOIS privacy. Even better, if you’re not ready to build your website quite yet, Squarespace will park your domain with a beautiful, ad-free landing page. Register your domain. Use offer code DARING to save 10 percent.
Hacked Cameras and DVRs Powered Today’s Massive Internet Outage ★: Brian Krebs:

A massive and sustained Internet attack that has caused outages and network congestion today for a large number of Web sites was launched with the help of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, such as CCTV video cameras and digital video recorders, new data suggests. […]

According to researchers at security firm Flashpoint, today’s attack was launched at least in part by a Mirai-based botnet. Allison Nixon, director of research at Flashpoint, said the botnet used in today’s ongoing attack is built on the backs of hacked IoT devices — mainly compromised digital video recorders (DVRs) and IP cameras made by a Chinese hi-tech company called XiongMai Technologies. The components that XiongMai makes are sold downstream to vendors who then use it in their own products.

“It’s remarkable that virtually an entire company’s product line has just been turned into a botnet that is now attacking the United States,” Nixon said, noting that Flashpoint hasn’t ruled out the possibility of multiple botnets being involved in the attack on Dyn.

Friday, 21 October 2016

Microsoft’s Stock Hits an All-Time High ★

Dan Frommer:

Microsoft’s stock price reached an all-time high today, beating a previous record set in 1999 (!) in the heat of the dot-com bubble. Shares opened this morning at $60.31 — up 5 percent from yesterday’s close — and reached $60.45 in morning trading before settling.

Why is Microsoft setting share-price records in 2016?

Most importantly, investors seem to think its transformation under CEO Satya Nadella — from a company that sells Windows and Office licenses (often on discs and in cardboard boxes) to a company that sells access to software and services in the cloud — is working.

Pretty good start for Satya Nadella.

Rank and File Wells Fargo Employees on the Pressure to Rip Off Customers to Meet Sales Quotas ★

Stacy Cowley, reporting for the NYT:

The scandal at Wells Fargo over the creation of unauthorized accounts shook its customers’ faith in the bank, but it took an even sharper toll on the company’s workers. A number of them say they faced a stark choice: Create new accounts by any means possible, or risk being fired for falling short of their sales goals.

Angie Payden, who worked for Wells Fargo as a banker from 2011-2014:

I started to have extreme physical stress-related symptoms as well as random panic attacks. At some point during that summer, the stress was so intense that I could no longer handle the pressure. On the banker’s desk, in the bathroom, behind the teller line and in the vault, the store kept bottles of hand sanitizer.

One morning, before meeting with a customer, in which I knew I was going to have to sell unneeded services, I had a severe panic attack. I went to the bathroom and took a drink of some hand sanitizer.

This immediately reduced my anxiety. From that point, I began drinking the hand sanitizer all over the bank.

Why Do Websites Publish AMP Pages? ★

Can someone explain to me why a website would publish AMP versions of their articles? They do load fast, which is a terrific user experience, but as far as I can see, sites that publish AMP pages are effectively ceding control over their content to Google.

Here’s an example I ran into today. I wanted to read Ron Amadeo’s review of the Google Pixel at Ars Technica. From my (new) Google Pixel, I searched for “ars pixel preview”. The first search result was the AMP version of his review. Same thing on my iPhone.

If I tap the result, I get the AMP version of the Ars article, served from Google’s domain. So far, I get it. But the kicker is that I don’t see any way to get from the AMP page Google is serving to the canonical version of the article on Ars’s website. Even if I share the article, what gets shared is the google.com URL (https://www.google.com/amp/arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/google-pixel-review-bland-pricey-but-still-best-android-phone/). On desktop browsers, these URLs do get redirected to Ars’s website. But on mobile they don’t. Share from one mobile device to another and nobody ever leaves google.com. Why would any website turn their entire mobile audience — a majority share of their total audience, for many sites today — over to Google?

It makes no sense to me.

Update: “Request Desktop Site” in both Mobile Safari and Chrome will switch you to the actual website. Good to know, I still say AMP traps mobile users onto google.com.

Pushback on Those Tesla Model S Sales Figures ★

Doug DeMuro makes a strong case that the Tesla Model S is a mid-size luxury sedan, not a full-size:

So the Model S is sized like a midsize luxury sedan, and it’s priced like one, too. Why doesn’t anyone call the Model S a midsize luxury sedan?

Simple: because Tesla doesn’t want them to.

Tesla has fought incredibly hard for media sources to consider the Model S a full-size luxury sedan, for one simple reason: Its sales numbers aren’t as impressive if you compare it to more accurate rivals. As I mentioned above, Tesla sold 9,156 units of the Model S during the last quarter. In the same time period, Mercedes-Benz sold 14,672 units of the E-Class. Meanwhile, the 5 Series sold 7,430 units of an aging model nearing replacement. When a redesigned 5 Series last debuted, as it will again in the next few months, it wasn’t uncommon to see sales totals well in excess of 5,000 per month — or 15,000 per quarter. Even the Hyundai Genesis is nipping at the Model S’s heels, earning around 2,500 sales per month through 2016.

Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking ★

Julia Angwin, reporting for ProPublica:

When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.”

And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.

But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand — literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools. […]

The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the web may now be customized to them based on the keywords they used in their Gmail. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.

My question is simple. Why is Google doing this? To make even more money? Or because they need to do this to keep making the same amount of money? Either way it’s gross.

Don’t Hold Your Breath for an iPhone Edition

Thursday, 20 October 2016

After my link today to Greg Koenig’s excellent explanation for why the new ceramic Apple Watch Edition does not presage the use of a similar material in next year’s iPhone (in short: Apple needs to produce up to one million iPhones per day, and the ceramic process Apple is using for the watch would take way too long to meet that demand), several readers asked if Apple might go the Apple Watch Edition route: make a special ceramic iPhone Edition that sells at a much higher price.

Apple certainly could do this. But I don’t think they would. I’ve often said that the iPhone reminds me of Andy Warhol’s great quote about Coca-Cola and America:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

A significantly more expensive limited edition ceramic iPhone would break from this, and in my opinion it would take away from the iPhone’s brand. iPhones aren’t cheap, but they are affordable for many, and everyone who gets one knows they’re getting the best phone in the world. An expensive limited edition iPhone would mean most iPhone buyers would know they’re only getting second best.

Apple has done this with the watch — in spades last year, with the $10–20,000 gold models — but watches are different animals. Watches, in general, have never been like Coke. There have always been low-cost watches and luxury watches.

Enough With the 10-Year Anniversary Stuff

Let me add here a note about something that’s been bothering me for months: the notion that Apple is going to do something “special” next year to commemorate the iPhone’s 10th anniversary. I would wager heavily that they won’t. Apple under Tim Cook is a little bit more prone to retrospection than it was under Steve Jobs, who was almost obsessively forward-thinking, but only slightly. They made a 40-years-in-40-seconds video to commemorate the company’s 40th anniversary this year, for example, but it was only 40 seconds long. Blink and you missed it.

Apple is not going to make a special edition of any product — let alone the iPhone, their most important product — just to mark an anniversary. Don’t tell me about the 20th Anniversary Macintosh — that was a product from the old Apple that was heading toward bankruptcy, and a perfect example of why they shouldn’t do something special to mark something as arbitrary as an anniversary.

A lot of this 10th anniversary of the iPhone speculation is regarding the rumors that next year’s new iPhones might sport a new industrial design, with edge-to-edge displays that eliminate both the top and bottom bezels from the front face. If such a design does appear next year, the timing will be purely coincidental.

What’s the logic otherwise? That Apple could have debuted that design this year, but didn’t, simply because they wanted to hold off until the iPhone’s oh-so-precious 10th anniversary? That is not how a technology company operates. To maintain its position as the leading phone-maker in the world, Apple must push forward as fast as they can. They only know one way to play the game: as hard as they can.

Nothing gets held back from any Apple product just to make the next one more special. If there is going to be a new edge-to-edge iPhone design, it will appear as soon as it is ready — no sooner, and no later. It would make no sense to hold back a more visually impressive and practically superior¹ design just to be able to call it the “10th anniversary iPhone” a year from now. That would mean selling fewer iPhones this year while sticking with the familiar 6/6S form factor, and not selling any additional iPhones next year. No one — no one — is going to buy any new iPhone just because it’s the 10th anniversary edition.

Every year, Apple releases the best iPhone it is able to make. That’s it. It makes no more sense for a tech company to hold back a new design for an entire year just to mark an anniversary than it would for a, say, 99-year-old sports team to bench its star player for a year to make their 100-year-anniversary team even more special. I do believe that Apple leads the industry, but they don’t lead by such a margin that they can afford to pull their punches just for an “anniversary” marketing gimmick.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple never even mentions next year that 2017 is the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone. And if they do mention it, I think it will be a brief passing reference on stage, not a part of any advertising or marketing campaign.² New iPhones — new Apple products, period — are marketed as new. Anniversaries are about getting old. ★

If Apple goes with an edge-to-edge display, they can either keep the display sizes the same (4.7- and 5.5-inch) and greatly reduce the overall size of the devices, or they can keep the device sizes the same as they are now and greatly increase the size of the displays. Either way is a win. (My guess though is that Apple will shrink the devices — Apple likes smaller devices.) ↩︎
I’ll enjoy a nice serving of homemade claim chowder if Apple goes and names next year’s iPhone the “iPhone 10” and makes the anniversary central to its branding. ↩︎︎

Ads via The Deck