Android Police: ‘This Is the 2017 Google Pixel “XL”’ 

Looks great. If this is legit, they’ll sell thousands more of them than last year.

Apple Extends Free Repairs of First-Generation Apple Watches With Detached Back Covers 

It’s good that Apple is doing this, but the fact that these things are just glued together shows how different Apple Watches are from traditional mechanical watches. You can buy a $60 watch from Seiko with better assembly quality than an Apple Watch Edition.

Monday, 10 July 2017

Max Boot: ‘Trump Has Picked America’s Enemies in Russia Over Its Friends in Europe’ 

Max Boot, writing for Foreign Policy:

His nutty behavior is bad enough at home; it’s even worse abroad when he is supposed to be representing not just his rabid base of “deplorables” but, rather, the whole country. That is something Trump simply does not know how to do.

Thus, in the course of this trip, he trashed his predecessor, the U.S. intelligence community, and the “fake news” media. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan in 1981 going abroad and attacking Jimmy Carter for not doing more to stand up to Soviet aggression? Or attacking the press for being hostile to him in the 1980 campaign (as they were) and the intelligence community for not predicting the Iranian revolution (as they did not)? It’s unimaginable, yet Trump somehow thinks that it’s appropriate.

Sunday, 9 July 2017

FlightLogger 

My thanks to FlightLogger for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. FlightLogger lets you search for and save flights, get up-to-date notifications on any changes, share your travel coordinates with friends and family, and much more — all from one easy-to-use app.

Get real-time flight tracking for updates on departure and arrival times, delays, cancellations, gate and baggage claim information.

Available on all your devices: Add your flights on your iPhone and your flight information will be automatically synced to your iPad and Apple Watch all with an easy-to-use and clutter-free interface.

Get FlightLogger as a free download on the App Store today.

Speculation Regarding the Pricing of and Strategy Behind This Year’s New iPhones

Friday, 7 July 2017

I created a bit of a stir the other day when I suggested the OLED iPhone “Pro” could start at $1,500.

Let’s take a serious look at this. $1,500 as a starting price is probably way too high. But I think $1,200 is quite likely as the starting price, with the high-end model at $1,300 or $1,400.

First, consider the problems Apple faces with any new iPhone. Here are the prices for the iPhone 7:

  • iPhone 7 32 GB: $649
  • iPhone 7 128 GB: $749
  • iPhone 7 256 GB: $849

And 7 Plus:

  • iPhone 7 Plus 32 GB: $769
  • iPhone 7 Plus 128 GB: $869
  • iPhone 7 Plus 256 GB: $969

These prices have remained unchanged ever since the “Plus” era began with the iPhone 6 models in 2014. [Update: Several astute readers have reminded me that the 6 Plus and 6S Plus were $749/849/949 — the prices went up by $20 with the 7 Plus, presumably due to the cost of the dual camera module, but perhaps also as a small test of the iPhone’s price elasticity.] Apple reports its company-wide profit margin each quarter, which tends to hover around 37 or 38 percent. Apple does not report margins per-device or per-product-line, but considering that the iPhone accounts for around 70 percent of all Apple revenue, the margins for new iPhones almost certainly are somewhere between 35–40 percent. The exact number doesn’t really matter for the sake of this argument, so let’s just say that any new iPhone must have a profit margin of at least 35 percent for Apple to maintain its company-wide profit margin, and let’s further assume that maintaining company-wide margins in the high 30s is non-negotiable for the company.

Based on reactions to my post earlier this week, I think many people assume that the only thinking that goes into iPhone pricing is how much it costs for Apple to produce each iPhone. In other words, that the specs for the iPhone 7 were decided by how much Apple could put into them with $649/749/849 retail prices while achieving a profit margin of at least 35 percent. And that the specs for this year’s new iPhones have been set by the same logic.

But that’s too simplistic. You can’t talk about iPhone specs and pricing without considering scale. It’s not enough for Apple to create a phone that can be sold for $649/749/849 with 35 percent profit margins. They have to create a phone that can be sold at those prices, with those margins, and which can be manufactured at scale. And for Apple that scale is massive: anything less than 60–70 million in the quarter in which it goes on sale is a failure — possibly a catastrophic failure.

In short, new iPhones aren’t defined by what Apple can build for a certain price, but by what Apple can make for a certain price at a certain incredibly high quantity.

The iPhone’s scale — particularly the incredible popularity of the new high-end models each year — is Apple’s biggest financial strength but simultaneously its biggest potential strategic weakness. It prevents Apple from using any components in new iPhones that can’t be produced at a rate of 20-25 million per month, or roughly a rate of 1 million per day. The differences between regular and Plus models complicate this a little — only the Plus models need the dual camera systems, for example — but to date, even considering the Plus models, it has been true that all new iPhones need to be able to be produced in sufficient quantity to meet massive demand.

Based on the rumor mill this year — particularly reports from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo — it sounds like Apple is trying to expand the iPhone product line at the high end to get out of this trap. The best available iPhone should be, at least arguably, the best phone in the world. That might not be possible if all new iPhones must be capable of being manufactured in the same quantities as in recent years.

What Apple has traditionally done is make one new iPhone each year, priced at the same points as the previous year’s models. And the previous year’s models move down $100 each in the lineup, and the two-year-old models move down to the entry level. A lot of people seem to expect Apple to do the same this year, with the OLED minimal-bezel new iPhone starting out at the same or roughly the same prices as the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. I think that’s why so many people are referring to this phone as the “iPhone 8”.

But that’s not what the rumors are saying at all. Ming-Chi Kuo’s overall record is a bit mixed, but his record on the iPhone (or perhaps better put, for Apple products assembled by Foxconn) is excellent. And Kuo has been reporting all along that Apple is creating three new phones for 2017:

  • A new 4.7-inch phone with an LCD display, same or similar form factor as iPhone 7.
  • A new 5.5-inch phone with an LCD display, same or similar form factor as iPhone 7 Plus.
  • An all-new form factor with a tall, skinny OLED display and new edge-to-edge bezel-less display.

In other words, marketing-wise, an iPhone 7S, iPhone 7S Plus, and an iPhone Deluxe. The iPhone 7S and 7S Plus sound like exactly what you’d expect from an S model year: same form factors as last year, with upgraded components and a new A-series system on a chip. There is no reason to expect these phones to cost less than today’s iPhone 7 and 7 Plus do. If Apple were going to sell the fancy new OLED iPhone Deluxe at the same prices as today’s iPhone 7 models, there would be no 7S or 7S Plus — they would just keep the existing 7 and 7 Plus and lower their prices by $100.

But that’s not what the rumors are saying.

Furthermore, Kuo has been saying all along that the fancy new OLED iPhone is going to be supply-constrained compared to previous new iPhone launches:

We predict October-November & August-September as production ramp-up schedules of OLED iPhone & LCD iPhone, respectively. “For optimized promotional effect, we think Apple may unveil the three models simultaneously in September, though the launch date of the OLED version may trail that of LCD models, and supply tightness may not improve before 1H18.”

We forecast shipments of the three new models in 2017F will be 80-85mn units, with an equal split between OLED & LCD versions.

Apple’s 2017 financial year ends September 30, so I’m assuming that “2017F” means the fourth quarter of the 2017 calendar year. But I don’t see how an even split between LCD and OLED iPhones makes sense if the OLED model’s “supply tightness may not improve before 1H18”. If supply is tight for six months or longer, how can half of Apple’s iPhone sales be for the OLED model?

It sounds to me like the OLED iPhone is a phone which Apple can’t make 40 million of per quarter, at least not today. And if that’s true, that means it should be more expensive. Not should in any moral sense, but simply because that’s how the principle of supply and demand works. When supply is constrained and demand is high, prices go higher. The higher prices alleviate demand.

Intriguingly, regarding device storage, Kuo also says:

Three new models will all come with 64GB and 256GB storage options

Assuming that’s true and that Kuo means the phones will only come in 64 and 256 GB configurations, I can see two ways this plays out for the 7S and 7S Plus:

Scenario 1:

  • 32 GB 7, no-S: $549
  • 64 GB 7S: $649
  • 256 GB 7S: $749
  • 32 GB 7 Plus, no-S: $669
  • 64 GB 7S Plus: $769
  • 256 GB 7S Plus: $869

Scenario 2:

  • 32 GB 7, no-S: $649
  • 64 GB 7S: $749
  • 256 GB 7S: $849
  • 32 GB 7 Plus, no-S: $769
  • 64 GB 7S Plus: $869
  • 256 GB 7S Plus: $969

If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m basing this analysis on Ming-Chi Kuo’s reporting, I would expect 32/128/256 configurations of the 7S models, at the same prices as today’s 7 models. Apple was very slow to move beyond 16 GB base configurations; it seems odd to me that they’d be so quick to move beyond 32 GB base configurations. It also seems odd that Apple would move away from the successful good-better-best strategy of having three storage tiers. But that’s what Kuo is reporting.

So in my Scenario 2, where the 256 GB 7S and 7S Plus cost $849 and $969 respectively, the base model 64 GB OLED iPhone would have to cost at least $999, and I think more likely $1099, and the 256 GB model would cost at least $1099 or $1199.

But if Apple expects severe supply constraints on these iPhones, I think prices of $1199 (64 GB) and $1299 (256 GB) are more likely. I honestly don’t think something like $1249/1399 is out of the question.

The prices for these iPhones need to be high enough so that tens of millions of people still want to buy the iPhone 7S and 7S Plus. If the “iPhone Pro” or “iPhone Edition” or whatever it is that Apple is going to call this phone starts at $800 or even $900, who is going to buy an iPhone 7S or 7S Plus? Not enough people, that’s who. Apple needs tens of millions of people to buy the 7S and 7S Plus because they aren’t going to be able to produce the “Pro/Edition” model in sufficient quantity.

Think about it: if Apple thought they were going to be able to produce the iPhone Pro/Edition model in sufficient quantity (say, at least 50 or 60 million per quarter, starting this year) and could do so for a $700-800 starting price point, and maintain their desired profit margins, why would the 7S and 7S Plus even exist?

Conversely, if the iPhone Pro/Edition were something Apple suspected it could only manufacture at a quantity of, say, 10 million or so units per quarter (perhaps simply by maxing out the world’s OLED production capabilities), wouldn’t the rumor mill look exactly like it does today: with the Pro/Edition model looking like a new premium tier and the new 7S and 7S Plus models set to occupy the existing “regular” price points for new iPhones?

What many people want, obviously, is for the new OLED iPhone to simply be the “iPhone 8” and wow us with a new design at the same old prices. But what is Apple supposed to do if, say, Samsung can only produce 10 million OLED displays for Apple per quarter? Apple can’t magically produce whatever it wants in sufficient quantity at current prices.

Furthermore, why shouldn’t there be a deluxe “Pro” tier for phones? For many people, phones are every bit as much an essential professional tool as their laptops. For some people, even more so. And I’d bet my bottom dollar there are more people who consider their iPhone a “pro” tool (and are willing to pay “pro” prices) than who think so regarding their iPad, and we’ll have had iPad Pros for two years by the time new iPhones are announced in September. If there are iPad Pros and MacBook Pros, why not iPhone Pros?

If you want to argue that Apple should never create an iPhone with a higher starting price than what we have today, you’re implicitly arguing that Apple should never put any components into a new iPhone that can’t be made at iPhone 7 scale. I think that’s dangerous strategically, leaving Apple open to attack from competitors making premium phones with components (cameras, displays, new sensors, new battery technologies, etc.) that can only be produced in single-digit millions per quarter.

On the other hand, without question, this “new premium tier” strategy that I’m suggesting poses its own significant risk for Apple. The mere existence of the new edge-to-edge OLED iPhone could dampen excitement for the iPhone 7S and 7S Plus, leading to a decrease in overall sales. “I don’t want a 7S because it’s boring, but I don’t want to spend $1,200 on an iPhone Pro/Edition because that’s too much for a phone, no matter how nice it is.” That sentiment could be trouble for Apple.

Personally, I think this strategy makes sense, and arguably is overdue. In the same way it made sense for Honda and Toyota to create their Acura and Lexus divisions to sell higher-end cars without eroding the value or popularity of their best-selling Accords and Camrys, it makes sense for Apple to create a premium tier for the iPhone, the best-selling product the company has ever made and likely will ever make. But Apple won’t have the luxury (pardon the pun) of doing so under an Acura- or Lexus-like new brand. They’ll have to do it as Apple. 

Friday, 7 July 2017

Justin Williams Got Hacked and All He Got Was This New SIM Card 

Justin Williams:

I like to think I take an above average amount of steps to secure myself online: I use a password manager, unique passwords as complex as the site will allow, and turn on 2-factor authentication when possible. A true security expert will likely find some sort of flaw in my setup, but I’ll argue that I am doing more than 95% of the planet.

So how did I, someone who is reasonably secure, have his cell phone disabled, his PayPal account compromised, and a few hundred dollars withdrawn from his bank account?

Two-factor authentication using your cell number is only as secure as your wireless carrier’s protection against social engineering — which, alas, might be terrible.

Apple’s Bad Beta Decision on Em and En Dashes in iOS 11 

Glenn Fleishman:

Terrible news. Apple is replacing the long-running convention of typing two hyphens to obtain an em dash or “long dash.” That is, if you type “--”, many places in the interface in which autocorrection is enabled or third-party software takes advantage of autocorrection, it’s turned into —. […]

Why is this terrible news? Some have argued with me on Twitter that it’s more logical: “-” for hyphen, “--” for the longer en dash, and “---” for the longest em dash. You type more hyphens to get a longer dash.

My rejoinder is twofold. First, most people rarely use an en dash, although I’d like to increase that number. Second, a billion people have learned that typing “--” leads to a long dash. I may be exaggerating the number, but given that Microsoft Word, Pages, and other desktop software performs this substitution silently, it’s a widespread convention being overturned.

I really hope this gets changed before iOS 11 ships.

Also, I’m not sure why dash conversion is part of “smart punctuation”. Converting simple hyphens to en- and em-dashes could be handled by iOS’s text substitutions. By default, for example, iOS has long had a substitution to change “(c)” to “©”. If en- and em-dashes were handled there, everyone could be happy because they could change it.

The only punctuation marks that needs to be “smart” are quotes. Right now in the iOS 11 betas, “smart” punctuation is all-or-nothing — to get smart quotes you have to accept smart dashes too.

Thursday, 6 July 2017

Jon Bois: ‘What Football Will Look Like in the Future’ 

I implore you to drop everything and read this now, regardless if you care about or even understand the rules of the game.

Trust me.

Speaking of $1,200–1,600 Phones 

Red has announced (and is accepting pre-orders for) a 2018 high-end Android phone with a “holographic display”. $1,200 for aluminum, $1,600 for titanium. (Via The Verge.)

AdAge: Apple News Reportedly Open to Letting Publishers Sell Ads 

Garett Sloane, reporting for AdAge:

Apple is working on a money fix for publishers that send their articles and content to its News app but so far have gotten very little in return, according to people familiar with the plans.

Apple News will let top media partners use their own technology to fill the ad space in their content, becoming more of an extension of the publishers’ own websites than the walled-off island it is now, the people said.

M.G. Siegler:

I, for one, can’t wait for an Apple News app with interstitials and quotes of the day. Also articles that take 45 seconds to load.

I get it that publishers need to make money. Trust me, I get that — I am a publisher. But I don’t get why Apple would allow the reading experience in Apple News to be junked up.

Publishers need to find ways to do ads that don’t interrupt or delay the reading experience. I don’t know why this is so hard for them to understand.

Wednesday, 5 July 2017

Letters and Liquor 

Right up my alley: Matthew Wyne’s delightfully-illustrated history of popular cocktails.

Glenn Fleishman Reviews the New Glif 

Glenn Fleishman, writing for Macworld:

Studio Neat’s latest tripod adapter, Glif, fits all phones (even non-Apple ones) in an attractive and well-made new design that uses a padded locking clamp and three mounting screw holes instead of one.

This compact adapter is the perfect companion for a serious iPhone photographer looking for maximum flexibility, as well as a casual snapshotter who wants a better way to hold their camera, even without a tripod. I’ve used it on tripods and with the optional wooden handle.

I’ve been a fan of the Glif ever since the first model. But these latest ones are truly great — and future-proof.

Monday, 3 July 2017

Ming-Chi Kuo Says No Touch ID on New OLED iPhone 

Ming-Chi Kuo this morning:

We predict the OLED model won’t support fingerprint recognition, reasons being: (1) the full-screen design doesn’t work with existing capacitive fingerprint recognition, and (2) the scan-through ability of the under-display fingerprint solution still has technical challenges, including: (i) requirement for a more complex panel pixel design; (ii) disappointing scan-through of OLED panel despite it being thinner than LCD panel; and (iii) weakened scan-through performance due to overlayered panel module. As the new OLED iPhone won’t support under-display fingerprint recognition, we now do not expect production ramp-up will be delayed again (we previously projected the ramp-up would be postponed to late October or later).

Mark Gurman, hours later:

For its redesigned iPhone, set to go on sale later this year, Apple is testing an improved security system that allows users to log in, authenticate payments, and launch secure apps by scanning their face, according to people familiar with the product. This is powered by a new 3-D sensor, added the people, who asked not to be identified discussing technology that’s still in development. The company is also testing eye scanning to augment the system, one of the people said.

A few thoughts:

  • No Touch ID would be weird. If it’s true, then the 3D facial recognition has to be as good or better than Touch ID in every way, in all lighting conditions, or else it will be a severe regression.

  • Gurman is late again. Everything in his report was first reported by Kuo.

  • I don’t believe anything related to the new iPhones is still “in testing”. I’m sure they’re still finalizing the software, but the ship has sailed on which sensors the devices are going to have.

  • If it’s true that Apple is going to release three new iPhones, my bet is that they’re named the iPhone 7S, iPhone 7S Plus, and iPhone Pro. And I hope the iPhone Pro starts at $1500 or higher. I’d like to see what Apple can do in a phone with a higher price.

Sunday, 2 July 2017

Is Amazon Getting Too Big? 

Elizabeth Weise, writing for USA Today:

Of printed books, about 38% of the 800 million sold in 2016 were sold on Amazon. For ebooks it’s about 75% of the 400 million sold. And for audio books it’s close to 95% of the 50 million sold.

Looks like it’s time for the Department of Justice to open another investigation of Apple’s e-book business.

Timing 

This week’s DF RSS feed was sponsored by Timing — an absolutely terrific time-tracking app for the Mac. Anyone with an even casual familiarity with my personal interests knows that I love truly native Mac apps. Timing is a home run — it is both great at time-tracking and great at being a Mac app.

The way it works is sublime. You still install it and let it run in the background. Timing automatically tracks which apps, documents, and websites you use — without start/stop timers. You can then assign things you’ve done to projects or clients after the fact. It’s a beautiful, intuitive interface and experience.

If you’re curious, last week’s DF columns took me a total of 4 hours 42 minutes to write — a little over three hours in MarsEdit and 90 minutes in BBEdit.

If you have any interest in tracking your time — whether for client work or simply to be aware of your productivity — you need to check out Timing. Download a free 14-day trial today and save 10 percent when you purchase Timing through Friday, 7 July.

Friday, 30 June 2017

The WSJ: ‘How the iPhone Was Born: Inside Stories of Missteps and Triumphs’ 

Ten-minute video from The Wall Street Journal with new interviews from Scott Forstall, Greg Christie, and Tony Fadell on the creation of the original iPhone. Great stuff.

Fraser Speirs: ‘Can a Laptop Replace Your iPad?’ 

Fraser Speirs, back in 2015:

Firstly, consider the hardware. The huge issue with the MacBook Pro is its form factor. The fact that the keyboard and screen are limited to being held in an L-shaped configuration seriously limits its flexibility. It is basically impossible to use a MacBook pro while standing up and downright dangerous to use when walking around. Your computing is limited to times when you are able to find somewhere to sit down.

Brilliant, and particularly apt this week. As I pointed out the first time I linked to it, the original title for the piece says it all: “If Journalists Reviewed Macs Like iPads”.

From the DF Archive: iPhone First Impressions 

My thoughts and first impressions of the original iPhone from 10 years ago:

Real-time dragging is such a priority that if the iPhone can’t keep up and render what you’re dragging in real-time, it won’t even try, and you get a checkerboard pattern reminiscent of a transparent Photoshop layer until it catches up (typically, an instant later). I.e. iPhone prioritizes drag animation over the rendering of the contents; feel over appearance.

This was a profound change in priorities from the Mac. In the early years of Mac OS X, Mac hardware wasn’t powerful enough to render the Aqua user interface. Scrolling was slow, and when you resized windows, it felt really slow, because the interface was trying to keep up. The OS tried its best to render everything in real-time even if it couldn’t.

The original iPhone likewise wasn’t powerful enough to render the user interface, notably while scrolling long web pages. Rather than try to keep up, the iPhone would just show that checkboard, which could scroll as fast as your fingers could swipe. Prioritizing feeling fast over visual fidelity made the experience better. One of many brilliant decisions by the original iPhone team, and I suspect a lesson learned from Mac OS X’s debut half a decade earlier.

I’ve always had strong feelings on the design of note-taking apps:

Notes: The weakest app on the iPhone. Cosmetically, it’s a train wreck. The entire iPhone UI is set in one typeface — Helvetica — and it’s gorgeous. But Notes, in a lame attempt to be “friendly”, displays a UI that looks like a pad of yellow legal paper, and uses the handwriting-esque Marker Felt as the font for note text. This is not adjustable. Marker Felt is silly, ugly, and worst of all, hard to read.

How Lightspeed Venture Partners Responded to Partner Justin Caldbeck’s Alleged Behavior 

Dan Primack, reporting for Axios:

When Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake told Lightspeed Venture Partners, an early investor in her company, that (then) Lightspeed partner Justin Caldbeck had sexually harassed her, the firm asked her to sign a non-disparagement agreement. Not signing, a source suggests, could have endangered her entire company’s future. So she signed, and remained silent about her experience.

Why it matters: Lightspeed today tweeted that it regrets not taking “stronger action” when it learned of Caldbeck’s alleged behavior. Lake signed the non-disparagement clause while Stitch Fix was trying to raise money — which it eventually did in a round led by top-tier VC firm Benchmark. Lightspeed could have blocked that investment.

Let me get this straight: Lightspeed now says “we regret we did not take stronger action”, but at the time, the only action they did take was to encourage Caldbeck’s accuser to sign a legal agreement to keep her mouth shut?

Translation: We regret that this has come to light.

Ends, Means, and Antitrust 

Ben Thompson on the European Commission’s €2.42 billion fine levied on Google for anti-competitive behavior:

The United States and European Union have, at least since the Reagan Administration, differed on this point: the U.S. is primarily concerned with consumer welfare, and the primary proxy is price. In other words, as long as prices do not increase — or even better, decrease — there is, by definition, no illegal behavior.

The European Commission, on the other hand, is explicitly focused on competition: monopolistic behavior is presumed to be illegal if it restricts competitors which, in the theoretical long run, hurts consumers by restricting innovation.

This is quite obviously true — best exemplified by, as Thompson himself writes, “the absurdity of the U.S. Justice Department successfully suing Apple for building a competitor to Amazon, the actual e-book monopolist.” That decision was entirely about the retail price of e-books.

But on the surface doesn’t this feel backwards? Shouldn’t the U.S. — the country where free-market capitalism is effectively a religion — be the country that values competition above all else? With genuine competition, fair prices should naturally result. Competition is the cause, fair prices are the effect. With a monopolist like Amazon that strategically keeps prices artificially low (Amazon sold bestselling e-books for $9.99 at a loss), not only does competition not follow as a result, the predatory pricing is the cause and lack of competition is the effect.

U.S. antitrust policy is blinded by the assumption that a monopolist’s only goal is to raise prices.

Glenn Fleishman on HEVC and HEIF 

Glenn Fleishman, writing for TidBITS:

If you haven’t already experienced abbreviation overload, Apple has added two more to your plate: HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) and HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format — yes, it’s short one F). These two new formats will be used by iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra when Apple releases them later this year.

While you may never have heard of HEVC or HEIF before, both are attempts to solve a set of problems related to video and still images. As people take photos and shoot video at increasingly higher resolutions and better quality, storage and bandwidth start to become limitations. Even in this day of ever-cheaper and ever-faster everything, consuming less storage space and requiring less bandwidth when syncing or streaming still has many positive aspects.

Motherboard: ‘The Life, Death, and Legacy of iPhone Jailbreaking’ 

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Brian Merchant, writing for Motherboard:

Ten years after the iPhone hit the sleek tables of Apple Stores worldwide, and the first-ever jailbreak, that Wild West is gone. There’s now a professionalized, multi-million dollar industry of iPhone security research. It’s a world where jailbreaking itself — at least jailbreaking as we’ve come to know it — might be over.

Perfect Ten

Thursday, 29 June 2017

In January 2007, 26 minutes into his Macworld Expo keynote address, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone with his justly-famous “three revolutionary products” framing:

This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two-and-a-half years.

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. … One’s very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career.

Apple’s been very fortunate. It’s been able to introduce a few of these into the world. In 1984, we introduced the Macintosh. It didn’t just change Apple, it changed the whole computer industry. In 2001, we introduced the first iPod, and it didn’t just change the way we all listen to music, it changed the entire music industry.

Well, today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class.

The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.

The second is a revolutionary mobile phone.

And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.

So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone … are you getting it?

These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.

Ten years ago today, the iPhone went on sale.

I almost never watch an Apple keynote event after it has faded from being new. But I’ve watched the iPhone introduction at least half a dozen times over the years. I still get excited. The words Jobs used, as quoted above, are perfect. But you really have to watch it, to listen to his voice, to feel his conviction. He knew then what we all know now: this was it. This was the keynote we had all been waiting for. This was the reason why people lined up overnight for Apple keynotes — in the hopes of an announcement like this one. The iPhone was the product Apple had been founded to create — the epitome of everything both of Apple’s founding Steves stood for and obsessed about. The home run of all home runs.

With hindsight, though, I think even Jobs himself underestimated what the iPhone was.

The Apple I, the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod — yes, these were all industry-changing products. The iPhone never would have happened without each of them. But the iPhone wasn’t merely industry-changing. It wasn’t merely multi-industry-changing. It wasn’t merely many-industry-changing.

The iPhone changed the world.

There is no way to overstate it. The iPhone was the inflection point where “personal computing” truly became personal. Apple had amazing product introductions before the iPhone, and it’s had a few good ones after. But the iPhone was the only product introduction I’ve ever experienced that felt impossible. Apple couldn’t have shrunk Mac OS X — a Unix-based workstation OS, including the Cocoa frameworks — to a point where it could run on a cell phone. Scrolling couldn’t be that smooth and fluid. A touchscreen — especially one in a phone — couldn’t be so responsive. Apple couldn’t possibly have gotten a major carrier to cede them control over every aspect of the device, both hardware and software. I can recall sitting in the hall at Moscone West, watching the keynote unfold, 90 percent excited as hell, 10 percent concerned that I was losing my goddamn mind. Literally mind-blowing.

For nearly six interminable months we waited. And then even once I had my own iPhone in my hands on the evening of Friday, 29 June 2007, I kept thinking, I can’t believe this.

The iPhone’s potential was obviously deep, but it was so deep as to be unfathomable at the time. The original iPhone didn’t even shoot video; today the iPhone and iPhone-like Android phones have largely killed the point-and-shoot camera industry. It has obviated portable music players, audio recorders, paper maps, GPS devices, flashlights, walkie-talkies, music radio (with streaming music), talk radio (with podcasts), and more. Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft wouldn’t even make sense pre-iPhone. Social media is mobile-first, and in some cases mobile-only. More people read Daring Fireball on iPhones than on desktop computers.

In just a handful of years, Nokia and BlackBerry, both seemingly impregnable in 2006, were utterly obliterated. The makers of ever-more-computer-like gadgets were simply unable to compete with ever-more-gadget-like computers.

Ten years in and the full potential of the iPhone still hasn’t been fully tapped. No product in the computing age compares to the iPhone in terms of societal or financial impact. Few products in the history of the world compare. We may never see anything like it again — from Apple or from anyone else. 

Thursday, 29 June 2017

iPhone: The Bet Steve Jobs Didn’t Decline 

Kontra:

Suppose you were the CEO of Apple in 2005 when a couple of intergalactic visitors with time-warping technology offered you this bet:

Design and manufacture a small mobile device that seamlessly combines the functionalities of a cellular phone, a web surfer, an audio/video player and a small PC, and your company will double its market cap and establish a third mass-market computing platform after Windows and Macintosh.

Would you take it?

Before you say, “Are you nuts, why wouldn’t I?” ponder just a few of the issues involved.

Remarkably prescient — Kontra wrote this back in 2008, but it reads like it was written with today’s hindsight.

‘Not Even Wrong’ 

Love this piece by Benedict Evans last month:

First of all, it’s quite common, especially in enterprise technology, for something to propose a new way to solve an existing problem. It can’t be used to solve the problem in the old way, so ‘it doesn’t work’, and proposes a new way, and so ‘no-one will want that’. This is how generational shifts work - first you try to force the new tool to fit the old workflow, and then the new tool creates a new workflow. Both parts are painful and full of denial, but the new model is ultimately much better than the old. The example I often give here is of a VP of Something or Other in a big company who every month downloads data from an internal system into a CSV, imports that into Excel and makes charts, pastes the charts into PowerPoint and makes slides and bullets, and then emails the PPT to 20 people. Tell this person that they could switch to Google Docs and they’ll laugh at you; tell them that they could do it on an iPad and they’ll fall off their chair laughing. But really, that monthly PowerPoint status report should be a live SaaS dashboard that’s always up-to-date, machine learning should trigger alerts for any unexpected and important changes, and the 10 meg email should be a Slack channel. Now ask them again if they want an iPad.

Joanna Stern Tries to Spend a Week Using an Original iPhone 

She lasted 12 hours.

‘Dear Craig Hockenberry. Please Write Twitterrific for iPhone.’ 

Ten years ago today, just four hours after walking out of the Apple Store at the King of Prussia Mall with my original iPhone (and just an hour or so after I finally got the damn thing activated through AT&T’s overwhelmed servers), I wanted native third-party apps. Not sure what in the world made me write “kthnxbye”, but I wanted a native Twitter client.

(Thanks to Joe Chott for reminding me about this tweet.)

Munster’s Model

Thursday, 29 June 2017

Gene Munster, now at Loup Ventures, has published a 5-year forecast for Apple:

Our best guess is that Apple Glasses, an AR-focused wearable, will be released mid FY20. This is based on the significant resources Apple is putting into AR, including ARKit and the recent SensoMotoric Instruments acquisition. We believe Apple see’s [sic] the AR future as a combination of the iPhone and some form of a wearable.

Dedicated AR glasses don’t make much sense for mainstream, daily-use, augmented reality. (They make perfect sense for specialized use, like the way Boeing is using Google Glass today to help assemble airplanes.) The phone is the perfect form factor for casual augmented reality — the camera is great, the display is great, and we all already have them in our pockets. People don’t want to wear glasses all the time, and even if they do, augmented reality is useful and interesting for an entirely different set of things than what a touchscreen interface is useful for.

I’m hard pressed to think of anything we do today on our phones that would be better using AR glasses. Anything. Apple may well be working on AR glasses, but if they are, the use cases are almost certainly new and different from those of the phone, and I would wager that such glasses would be like Apple Watch — a peripheral for your iPhone, not a replacement for it.

ARKit exists because ARKit is going to be useful and fun on iPhones and iPads today. If it weren’t useful and fun on iPhones and iPads, Apple would not add it to iOS. (Consider: there was nothing added to Mac OS X a decade ago to “set the foundation” for writing touchscreen-based apps for the iPhone.)

Look at some of the examples of ARKit-based apps for iOS already, just three weeks after Apple announced it at WWDC. Look at this example by Tomás García. Look at what Apple itself has done with Flyover mode in iOS 11 Maps. (If you’re running iOS 11 betas, search for the name of a major city, then tap the “Flyover” button. In iOS 10 and earlier, Flyover takes you along a set path, and you can touch the screen to pan or twist the view. In iOS 11 you move your iPhone like a camera, and you can walk around the real world to stride about the on-screen city like Godzilla.)

ARKit is not laying the foundation for Apple’s future move into augmented reality. ARKit is Apple’s move into augmented reality.

Back to Munster:

AirPods: Bigger Than Apple Watch. Over the next 10 years, we anticipate that AirPods will be bigger than the Apple Watch as the product evolves from simple wireless headphones to a wearable, augmented audio device. While both AirPods and Apple Watch should continue to grow, we see AirPods contributing about the same amount of revenue as Apple Watch by FY22. We expect the AirPods ASP to increase from $159 today to $200 in FY22 as the product shifts to augmented audio.

I think Munster has this entirely backwards. AirPods are just wireless headphones. The AR device is the iPhone, and AirPods are just a great audio output device for the iPhone. It doesn’t make sense to think of them as a standalone product. They’re a way to make your audio experience with existing Apple products much better. That’s it.

And I think the average selling price for AirPods will drop, not rise, over time. If Apple could sell them profitably for $99 today, I think they would. And at some point I think they’d like to include them in the box with new iPhones. 

Tuesday, 27 June 2017

Bloomberg Is Really Shitting the Bed Lately 

Bloomberg caused a huge stir (Hertz stock shot to a two-year high their largest one-day gain in over two years on the “news”) with this report yesterday by Alex Webb and David Welch:

Apple Inc. is leasing a small fleet of cars from Hertz Global Holdings Inc. to test self-driving technology, an agreement that echoes a larger deal between competitors Alphabet Inc. and Avis Budget Group Inc. Hertz shares soared the most in almost two years.

A few hours later CNBC uncovered the scope of this lease:

Sources familiar with the situation told CNBC that Apple is leasing six cars from a Hertz subsidiary for autonomous software testing.

Six whole cars!

And then Apple confirmed to CNBC that the company is simply leasing six cars, and there is no partnership with Hertz.

The Alphabet/Avis deal is a genuine partnership, involving over 600 vehicles. There is no “echo” of that partnership in Apple’s having leased six cars.

European Commission Fines Google €2.42 Billion for Abuse of Web Search Monopoly 

The European Commission:

The European Commission has fined Google €2.42 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.

The company must now end the conduct within 90 days or face penalty payments of up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

The euro and dollar remain roughly in balance — that’s about $2.7 billion today. My guess is Google just shrugs this off, pays the fine, and goes right back to promoting its own stuff in search results. (E.g. they favor their own local business listings over, say, Yelp’s.)

Using Today’s Web Without JavaScript 

Sonniesedge turned off JavaScript completely in her browser and tested how a bunch of major websites looked. Many of them were simply blank. But The New York Times worked:

The NY Times site loads in 561 ms and 957 KB without JavaScript. Holy crap, that’s what it should be like normally. For reference it took 12,000 ms (12 seconds) and 4000 KB (4 MB) to load with JavaScript. Oh, and as a bonus, you get a screenful of adverts.

A lot of images are lazy loaded, and so don’t work, getting replaced with funky loading icons. But hey ho, I can still read the stories.

Again I say: the web would be better off if browsers had never added support for scripting. Every site on the web would load in under a second.

WWDC 2017’s Accessibility News 

Steven Aquino, writing for TechCrunch:

Enhanced Dynamic Type. As mentioned at the outset, Apple has put in a lot of work to optimize how Dynamic Type handles itself at its largest sizes. New this year are options for even larger sizes that smartly adapt to various user interfaces. The Dynamic Type API, available for third-party developers to hook up to their apps, has been updated to take advantage of this new capability.

I can’t say enough good things about Dynamic Type — and that’s before the improvements in iOS 11. I need text to be a click or two bigger than the default size on my iPhone. What I love about Dynamic Type is that it doesn’t look like a special “big type for bad eyes” mode. It just looks normal, but with larger type. You don’t have to give up the aesthetic satisfaction of having everything look just right in order to have larger type that you can read.

Jean-Louis Gassée: ‘Apple Culture After Ten Years of iPhone’ 

Jean-Louis Gassée:

Let’s see if we can bring these unimaginable quantities into a manipulable picture.

During the most recent Xmas quarter, Apple sold slightly fewer than 80 million iPhones, about 900,000 a day. Obligingly, a day has 86,400 seconds, so we round up to 90,000 to get a production yield of ten iPhones per second.

But producing a phone isn’t instantaneous, it isn’t like the click of the shutter in a high-speed camera. Let’s assume that it takes about 15 minutes (rounded up to 1,000 seconds) to assemble a single iPhone. How many parallel production pipes need to accumulate ten phones a second? 1,000 divided by 1/10 equals… 10,000! Ten thousand parallel pipes in order to output ten phones per second.

We can juggle the numbers, but it’s still difficult to comprehend the scale and complexity of the iPhone production machine, to build a reliable mental representation.

Did the unimaginable iPhone production process change Apple? With numbers so large, how could it not?

I find it very hard to comprehend the scope of the iPhone’s scale.

Kill Sticky Headers (a.k.a. Dickbars) Bookmarklet 

Brilliantly simple bookmarklet by Alisdair McDiarmid:

There is currently a trend for using sticky headers on websites. There’s even a sticky header web startup.

I hate sticky headers. I want to kill sticky headers.

So I made this bookmarklet.

If you hate dickbars like I do, you should install this bookmarklet. Works great on both desktop and mobile. Here’s how it works:

The bookmarklet just finds all fixed-position elements on the page, and removes them. This might remove the navigation, but if you need it back, just hit refresh. That’s why I created a bookmarklet and not a custom user-stylesheet or browser plugin: this is the simplest way to solve the problem.

Dickbars Don’t Work 

Josh Clark, back in March:

Hey, please, under no circumstances should you pin social buttons to the top or bottom of mobile screens. In an effort to try to boost mobile use of share buttons, About.com experimented with fixing them to screen bottom and separately to screen top, so that the buttons were always visible when scrolling. While this did modestly increase share-button usage, it also caused overall session engagement to go down.

You read that right: adding a locked toolbar to the small-screen experience shortened sessions and reduced page views. The very small increase in share-button usage was far outweighed by reduced site usage. (I can’t explain why this is the case, but I’ve seen it elsewhere with locked toolbars, too. They chase small-screen users away.)

Read the whole article. First, Clark’s advice is based on actual results, not just opinion and hunches (like mine). Second, he doesn’t advise against ever showing custom sharing buttons — but he does say only to show them to visitors coming from social media referrals. And but even then, don’t put them in fixed position dickbars.

As for why dickbars actually decrease site usage, I think the answer is obvious: when people see user-hostile fixed position bars at the top and/or bottom of their display, especially on phones, they’re annoyed, and the easiest way to eliminate the annoyance is to close the fucking tab and move on to something that isn’t annoying.

Monday, 26 June 2017

The Talk Show: ‘I Do Like Throwing a Baby’ 

New episode of America’s favorite 3-star podcast, with special guest John Moltz. Topics include more follow-up from WWDC 2017, the iPad Pro models and ProMotion, Scott Forstall’s interview with John Markoff regarding the 10-year anniversary of the original iPhone, the ongoing shitshow at Uber, quick thoughts on the Nintendo Switch, and more. Also: guess which John enjoys throwing babies into the air.

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Virgin Mobile Partners With Apple to Go iPhone-Only With $1 Service 

Josh Centers, writing for TidBITS on Virgin Mobile’s intriguing decision to go iPhone-only:

Pundits have long suspected that two roadblocks stood in the way of Apple becoming a carrier: the infrastructure is incredibly expensive, even if you lease it from the larger carriers, and Apple could limit the iPhone business if it were to compete with the major carriers.

But Apple has sidestepped those concerns by essentially taking over a carrier (actually a carrier-owned MVNO — Mobile Virtual Network Operator) without acquiring it. Apple may not own Virgin Mobile, but Virgin Mobile is now utterly dependent on Apple and will benefit through promotion in Apple Stores.

We shouldn’t read too much into this deal, but at the very least it’s unusual to see a company like Virgin Mobile going all-in on the iPhone. And it might point toward Apple dipping its toe into the MVNO business.

Virgin Mobile is owned by Sprint (and thus uses Sprint’s back-end), and in my experience Sprint is the worst of the U.S. carriers, so this is not a panacea. But it is intriguing.

The Verge: ‘Apple’s AR Is Closer to Reality Than Google’s’ 

Two great examples via the very fun Made With ARKit Twitter account: here and here.

Rene Ritchie’s First Look at the iOS 11 Public Beta 

Rene Ritchie has a comprehensive look at the just-released public beta of iOS 11. Romain Dillet has a good preview at TechCrunch too. The gist of both previews: it’s the “I hope Apple truly focuses on the iPad this year” release of iOS that we’ve been waiting for.

I’ve been using the developer betas on my 10.5-inch iPad Pro review unit and a spare iPhone. I’m willing to wait to install iOS 11 on my primary iPhone, but at this point, bugs be damned, I wouldn’t want to use an iPad running iOS 10.3. It’s stable enough, and the benefits of the great new features for iPad far outweigh the downsides of the beta (which, in addition to crashing bugs, include questionable battery life).

Amazon’s New Echo Show Is Very Cool and a Little Creepy 

Mat Honan, writing for BuzzFeed:

It has this wild new feature called Drop In. Drop In lets you give people permission to automatically connect with your device. Here’s how it works. Let’s say my father has activated Drop In for me on his Echo Show. All I have to do is say, “Alexa, drop in on Dad.” It then turns on the microphone and camera on my father’s device and starts broadcasting that to me. For the several seconds of the call, my father’s video screen would appear fogged over. But then there he’ll be. And to be clear: This happens even if he doesn’t answer. Unless he declines the call, audibly or by tapping on the screen, it goes through. It just starts. Hello, you look nice today.

Honestly, I haven’t figured out what to think about this yet. But, it’s here.

I know what to think of this: No fucking way do I want this.

Update: I’ve already gotten a few reader responses arguing that this feature could be great for an Echo Show in the home of an elderly relative. You visit and set it up in their house, explain to them what it does, and then you can check in with them without their needing to do anything at all. I can see that. You can think of it as the digital equivalent of having a set of keys to someone’s house — something you’d only grant to a deeply trusted friend or loved one.

Verizon to Block Email Addresses From Rival Carriers From Logging Into Yahoo or Tumblr Accounts 

From a Tumblr help document euphemistically titled “Heads-Up for AT&T Customers”:

Starting on June 30, 2017, att.net customers will no longer be able to log in to their Yahoo and Tumblr accounts through email addresses with the following domains: att.net, ameritech.net, bellsouth.net, flash.net, nvbell.net, pacbell.net, prodigy.net, sbcglobal.net, snet.net, swbell.net, and wans.net.

The sheer egregiousness of this is outrageous on its face, but it’s even worse when you consider that Tumblr, when it was independent, was a champion for net neutrality.

Update: TechCrunch says it’s just a deal expiring, not spite:

As part of the new corporate merger of Yahoo and Aol under the Oath brand, it looks like Yahoo accounts will no longer be accessible through AT&T email addresses (or those of any A&T subsidiaries).

The move provoked some uproar among net neutrality advocates, but it seems to be less about creating walled gardens and more about cleaning up prior commitments and pre-existing partnerships. While there is a level of inconvenience for AT&T customers, this is less about net neutrality and more about unwinding those corporate deals.

I still say fuck Verizon and their stance on net neutrality.

Trump’s Lies, the Definitive List 

Copiously documented and perfectly presented. Looked striking in the print edition, too.

Sunday, 25 June 2017

Delta Updates and App Thinning Do Not Solve the Apps-Are-Too-Damn-Big Problem 

Matt Birchler:

“App thinning” is not a magic bullet that erases this problem though, as Facebook Messenger, which shows as being 154 MB, still downloaded 99 MB of data for its update. […]

So are giant app sizes a problem? Yes. Do delta updates allow these updates to use less data? Yes. Do delta updates make these large apps a non-issue? Hell no!