iOS 13, WatchOS 6, and tvOS 13 include support for this nice standardized set of symbols from Apple. It’s not a symbol font — though there is a font fallback — but it is designed to work perfectly with Apple’s San Francisco system font. Oddly, MacOS is not supported.
Hubert Horan, American Affairs Journal:
Above all, Uber argued that its business model and technology were so innovative that it had created an entirely new industry (“ridesharing”) based on entirely new business concepts (the “sharing economy”). It insisted that it was a “tech company” selling sophisticated software, and could not possibly be compared to taxi companies. In fact, however, Uber carries people from point A to point B, just like taxis have for a hundred years. The “tech company” claim was really an attempt to get people to ignore its huge losses, since tech companies like Facebook had quickly grown into profitability. The “software” claim was designed to justify preventing its drivers from getting the labor law protections employees are entitled to, based on the argument that they were totally independent entrepreneurs who had freely chosen to purchase Uber’s superi or software products. Furthermore, nothing in Uber’s business mod el is actually being shared. The only meaningful economic dis tinction between “taxis” and “ridesharing” is that the latter avoids regulations that traditional taxis must still obey and depends on billions in predatory investor subsidies.
Uber’s claim that its growth resulted from customers freely choosing its superior service in competitive markets is fundamentally false. Competitive markets use price and profit signals to help allocate resources to more efficient uses. Uber grew because its years of billion-dollar subsidies totally distorted those signals, and allowed it to drive more efficient producers out of business.
About a year and a half ago, I linked to a couple of pieces arguing that Uber’s most impressive revolutionary gesture would be if the company functioned as a long-term business. They have lost — and I’m going to write this out in full and italicize it — fourteen billion dollars in the last four years. Horan’s analysis of Uber’s performance to date is second-to-none, and he’s reasonably skeptical of attempts to distract from the company’s mismanagement and losses through the invocation of autonomous vehicles.
Allen Pike (via Michael Tsai):
But if the rumour and leak mill is to be believed, iTunes’ end is finally nigh. In macOS 10.15 we will finally see a Music.app for Mac. Surprisingly, this new app is said to be based not on the iOS app or a new codebase, but on the venerable iTunes itself.
There will surely be naysayers that claim iTunes should have been tossed entirely. And admittely, if the new Music app ditches iTunes’ interface but can’t cure its deep and baffling love for obtuse modal error dialogs, I too will bemoan its preservation. But arguing for code to be rewritten just because it’s old has never been the right way to build systems that work.
As infuriating as iTunes has become over the years, it remains among the most dependable pieces of software I use. I have seen all of the error messages in Pike’s piece — I laughed pretty hard as I read this one — and preorders are still unreliable, and there’s a dozen other problems that I could list off which you’ve undoubtedly heard of, if not personally experienced. Apple Music support, in particular, is awful. It’s so transparently a webpage that it feels like using an Electron app.
But, even so, I still use iTunes: I still listen to a local library, I still buy music, and I still sync music to my phone with a physical cable like our ancestors once did. I have already expressed my reservations about migrating to anything that is not iTunes; I’m encouraged by the latest rumours that Music for Mac may simply be a re-skinned iTunes without support for non-music things and, hopefully, way better integration of Apple Music.
And if they can clean up the code base at the same time, that would be appreciated, too.
Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica:
Last week, a California federal judge provided the FTC and Apple with sweet vindication. In a scathing 233-page opinion [PDF], Judge Lucy Koh ruled that Qualcomm’s aggressive licensing tactics had violated American antitrust law.
I read every word of Judge Koh’s book-length opinion, which portrays Qualcomm as a ruthless monopolist. The legal document outlines a nearly 20-year history of overcharging smartphone makers for cellular chips. Qualcomm structured its contracts with smartphone makers in ways that made it almost impossible for other chipmakers to challenge Qualcomm’s dominance. Customers who didn’t go along with Qualcomm’s one-sided terms were threatened with an abrupt and crippling loss of access to modem chips.
Good piece. You [left] out the part where Judge Koh says that she didn’t credit any of the Qualcomm witness testimony because it was not consistent with the contemporaneous documents (i.e. they were all a pack of liars).
Unsurprisingly, Qualcomm disagrees with Judge Koh’s opinion.
This is just a devastating read of the extortionate terms by which Qualcomm operated its FRAND patent portfolio. If this decision withstands Qualcomm’s appeal, it will basically birth a real market for competing cellular chipsets.
“Does this remind you of anything?” Vice reporter William Turton asked in one of Huawei’s retail locations, all of which are blatant knockoffs of Apple Stores, just after visiting Huawei’s campus on which there are replicas of specific European castles and chateaus. Apparently, Huawei invited lots of news organizations, but only Vice showed up, and it was very, very weird. Turton:
While in Hangzhou, we got a text in our WeChat group message at 3AM from a Huawei PR person that said just “help”.
I’m not sure what to make of this, other than that Huawei is very comfortable with their own absurdity and nonsense.
3D Touch is a wonderful idea executed poorly, and its replacement on the iPhone XR — what Apple calls “Haptic Touch”, which only works in some of the places 3D Touch does and which is just a standard long press with a bit of haptic feedback — is a muddied and hollow replacement — the La Croix version of 3D Touch.
I would prefer to see improvements to 3D Touch; but, because it hasn’t changed much or been more thoroughly applied in the nearly four years since it was introduced, I think the digital scrap heap is probably best. This rumour, of course, leads to the question of what to do with its dependencies on the iPhone. The biggest question, for me, is what happens to notifications: since they were adjusted in iOS 10 to make use of 3D Touch, they’ve never felt at home on non-3D Touch devices.
Paul Resnikoff, Digital Music News:
Apple is now experiencing meteoric growth on its streaming music platform, Apple Music. But that growth is directly impacting Apple’s old-line downloads store, for obvious reasons. And, ultimately hastening its demise.
Just last week, Apple executive Jimmy Iovine pointed to a shutdown when ‘people stop buying’. Now, sources inside the company are pointing to a firm date for a planned shutdown of the iTunes music download store. Earlier, these same sources pointed to an ‘early 2019’ shutdown, though internal roadmaps now include a March 31st, 2019 phase-out of the service.
It is the last week of May and you can still buy music on iTunes. Shocking that this rumour didn’t pan out, I know.
I mention this not to be a jerk to Resnikoff, but because screenshots leaked to Guilherme Rambo at 9to5Mac show a Music app that, with the little bit shown, does not have a visible section for purchasing, which reminded me of this rumour. Maybe the iTunes Store will be more fully integrated within Music, so an option to buy music could appear next to the option to add it to your library; or, perhaps iTunes Store purchases are relegated to the iTunes app and it is, indeed, slowly phased out. That would be a shame for me because I am one of those weird people who likes to buy music; also, I really don’t like DRM.
But, so far, there’s little to indicate that the iTunes Store is dead, even though March came and went.
Ryan Christoffel, MacStories:
Apple has been in the news at several points this year due to claims that its App Store practices are monopolistic. First, Spotify filed a complaint against Apple with the European Commission, then more recently, the US Supreme Court ruled that an antitrust lawsuit against Apple could proceed, setting the stage for potential future battles in this space.
Today Apple has launched a new page on its website defending its App Store practices and sharing the values that lie at the core of the Store.
Coincidentally, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg interviewed Apple’s former senior director of app review Phillip Shoemaker for a podcast that, I’m sure, will soon be entered into evidence in Apple’s antitrust cases:
Shoemaker also spoke about Apple not approving the Google Voice calling service in the early days of the iPhone. He said there was concern inside Apple that companies like Google or Facebook could create a slew of apps that would replace core iPhone functions.
“That was a real thing. I mean the fear that somebody would come along, a Facebook, a Google, whomever and wipe off and remove all of our items,” he said. “Once they started using these other apps, they’d be thinking more about Google now.” Ultimately, Google Voice and similar third-party calling services were approved for Apple’s App Store.
Apple highlights competing apps on their new App Store principles page, but none of these apps can be set as a default.1 Another difference is that some APIs are only available to Apple. Expect to hear these and other differences as these legal cases roll on.
Although, I have found that you can override some Siri commands. For example, if I ask my phone “what’s the weather like?”, Carrot will respond instead of the standard weather app — sometimes. It’s not reliable. ↩︎
That’s it; that’s the extent of the updates. It has the same display size as the iPhone 5, the same camera that was in the iPad Air 2, and comes in the same colours as it has for years.
My first assumption was that this was an easy update so that iOS 13 could phase out support for A8-equipped devices. But I’m not so sure about that, given that the iPad Mini and iPod Touch models that were shipping just a few months ago both used the A8. Mind you, if those products were updated more frequently, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post:1
It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?
Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same — and Apple could be doing more to stop it.
On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.
And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address — once every five minutes.
Of course, when you click to read this article, you’ll communicate with twenty-five other domains that will pilfer information like your full IP address and other unique identifiers, any of which can be tied back to your name or email address with little effort. If you’re using Safari, though, you’ll have some protection in the form of Intelligent Tracking Prevention; you may also use content blockers with your browser. I wish there were something like ITP across iOS. Even if Apple were to do a better job of policing the App Store and prevent unnecessary trackers in apps, many developers would find a way around those rules.
Update: This paragraph is key:
Yet very few apps I found using third-party trackers disclosed the names of those companies or how they protect my data. And what good is burying this information in privacy policies, anyway? What we need is accountability.
Adequate disclosure cannot be left up to developers, many of which will ignore that rule — either because they are bad actors deliberately exploiting users, or because they are ashamed of their anti-privacy practices. That shame, by the way, is a great indicator that bad choices are being made.
Anyway, full disclosure needs to be mandated by the system in much the same way the camera cannot be used without the user’s permission. Unfortunately, those permission dialogs are already overwhelming, and I suspect many users don’t fully read them before granting permission.
Add one more onto your tally of stories about Apple and privacy that use a photo of that Las Vegas billboard from CES. ↩︎
Apple granted Andrew Griffin of the Independent interview time with executives — including Craig Federighi — and access to their testing facilities, as they explained their privacy and security model. I appreciated Federighi’s reaction to the recent emphasis on privacy by Google and Facebook. But this, I think, is something of a dodge:
Federighi says that the location data is stored in matters less when the amount of information collected is minimised, and any that is is stored in ways that stop people from prying into it.
“Step one, of course, is the extent that all of our data minimisation techniques, and our keeping data on device and protecting devices from external access – all of these things mean that that data isn’t in any cloud in the first place to be accessed by anyone,” he says. By not collecting data, there is no data for officials in China or anywhere else to read or abuse, Apple claims.
This claim goes uncontested by Griffin, but it’s wrong. All iCloud data created by Chinese users is stored in China; even the iCloud user agreement for Chinese users is between the user and GCBD, not the user and Apple. Also, Apple’s software actively encourages customers to use iCloud services from a few moments after they power up a device for the first time. It is therefore misleading, at best, to state that Apple collects less data. The company may not collect behavioural data to the same extent as its competitors, but that does not apply to user-provided data.
The next paragraph is similarly misleading:
What’s more, Federighi argues that because the data is encrypted, even if it was intercepted – even if someone was actually holding the disk drives that store the data itself – it couldn’t be read. Only the two users sending and receiving iMessages can read them, for example, so the fact they are sent over a Chinese server should be irrelevant if the security works. All they should be able to see is a garbled message that needs a special key to be unlocked.
End-to-end encryption that allows decryption only by the sending and receiving parties is not universally applied to data stored in iCloud. While iCloud data is stored in encrypted formats, the vast majority of the keys are held by Apple and those files can be decrypted by request. Again, this claim is not subjected to further questioning in this story.
Update: After re-reading this, it’s clear that my disputes are with the reporter’s explanations, not Federighi’s. For example, in the second quote, there is no quote from anyone at Apple, and Griffin seems confused by the different kinds of encryption that are possible. In the first quote, Griffin is overly reductive.
Mark Scott, Laurens Cerulus, and Steven Overly, Politico:
Big fines and sweeping enforcement actions have been largely absent, as under-resourced European regulators struggle to define their mission — and take time to build investigations that will likely end up in court.
New forms of data collection, including Facebook’s reintroduction of its facial recognition technology in Europe and Google’s efforts to harvest information on third-party websites, have been given new leases on life under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.
Smaller firms — whose fortunes were of special concern to the framers of the region’s privacy revamp — also have suffered from the relatively high compliance costs and the perception, at least among some investors, that they can’t compete with Silicon Valley’s biggest names.
I’m not surprised by this, and I don’t view this as an indication that GDPR is unsuccessful. For one thing, establishing cases against larger and more complex tech firms is necessarily going to take more time. For another, it isn’t a bad thing that smaller companies are collecting less data as a result of compliance costs. Just because they’re not Google or Facebook, that doesn’t mean that a smaller company should be collecting huge data profiles on individuals. It is, of course, worrying that the side effect of this is to concentrate data collection with the biggest and most influential players; but, then, we circle back to the first point that it takes more time to build cases against bigger players.
The most alarming aspect of GDPR is, weirdly enough, the effect it’s having in the United States. Mark Scott on Twitter:
But what I find the most fascinating is what happened in Washington State. There, rules that specifically name-checked Europe’s [privacy] stance narrowly failed to pass in late April, despite heavy lobbying by industry (@microsoft, ahem) in favor of them.
US tech companies in favor of European-style privacy rules? I hear you ask. Well, yes. But it’s more complicated — and shows both how Europe’s standards are both now global and the straw man used to hobble other privacy efforts.
Whereas in Europe, [people] are automatically opted out of their data being collected unless they give consent, the Washington State rules, by default, gave companies the right to collect such digital information — remember, these rules supposedly were copied from those of the EU.
This isn’t the fault of GDPR rules, but the way that they have been manipulated by tech companies wary of other governments mandating opt-in consent. By that metric, then, GDPR has been quite effective: the idea that it could be a worldwide model scares the shit out of big industry players, and they’re doing everything they can to combat opt-in requirements.
The new nylon switch covers are curious, but I’m particularly interested in the apparent difference in the metal dome switches in this model. It would make sense that they could be a primary culprit for the failures in previous models: they physically activate the key press, which would correlate with a higher failure rate for keys pressed more often.
Of course, that doesn’t resolve dust ingress issues that are directly related to the low travel distance for these keys. But at least a materials failure may no longer be an issue. If I were in the market for a new computer, I’m still not sure I’d trust these. Including them in the keyboard repair program — which is basically four years of AppleCare solely for the keyboard — is a comforting measure that, yes, you can buy these Macs without worrying that you’ll have to pay $800 in a year for a full top case replacement because your space bar is stuck. Still, a no-cost repair is no replacement for a reliable keyboard.
Geoff Colvin, in a longform profile of AT&T and its CEO Randall Stephenson for Fortune:
The grand vision begins with combining all the major elements of the media and telecom businesses, which no company has ever done before. Time Warner’s film and TV studios make some of the most successful and honored entertainment anywhere. Its cable networks — including TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network, and Turner Classic Movies — are distribution powerhouses. DirecTV carries those networks and others into homes through its satellite system. Add in AT&T’s wireless and landline customers, and Stephenson boasts that AT&T has “170 million distribution points we can push this through.”
With such a combination of media assets, the theory goes, AT&T can achieve unprecedented advantages. It can differentiate its fast-commoditizing wireless network by offering customers deals on its proprietary content. It can expose its content to vast audiences through all its networks. Because it collects staggering volumes of customer data through its wired, wireless, and satellite networks, it can enable advertisers to target their messages with new precision and, in some cases, even track customers who have seen specific ads and thus gauge how the ads performed — services for which advertisers will gladly pay a big premium.
The immediate next step in the transformation, likely the biggest and most visible step, will be to introduce a video-on-demand Internet streaming service — a Netflix competitor — in this year’s fourth quarter. AT&T says the new service eventually will include original content, HBO, movies from multiple studios, and library content from HBO and Warner Bros.
Who, apart from AT&T shareholders and executives, finds this advantageous? The company’s deep vertical integration and sheer scale are a monument to ineffectual and consumer-unfriendly American antitrust laws. And that’s without getting to the wildly invasive advertising plan:
Adding strength to the whole proposition is AT&T’s unique aggregate customer data trove and its value in addressable advertising over DirecTV and AT&T’s direct-to-consumer streaming services; ads can also be directed less precisely through the former Turner networks. “Say you and your neighbor are both DirecTV customers and you’re watching the same live program at the same time,” says Brian Lesser, who oversees the vast data-crunching operation that supports this kind of advertising at AT&T. “We can now dynamically change the advertising. Maybe your neighbor’s in the market for a vacation, so they get a vacation ad. You’re in the market for a car, you get a car ad. If you’re watching on your phone, and you’re not at home, we can customize that and maybe you get an ad specific to a car retailer in that location.”
This is very creepy. It’s at least as invasive as what big tech companies like Google and Facebook do, but telecom conglomerates like AT&T aren’t getting the same negative press. They’re only allowed to do this because the Republican-led FCC, in 2017, struck down reasonable privacy restrictions that were to be enforced on telecom firms — companies like AT&T and Verizon are uniquely positioned to have what is likely the most comprehensive picture of users’ digital lives.
Nilay Patel, the Verge:
If this was a story about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, this scheme would cause a week-long outrage cycle. It is outrageous, especially when you consider that AT&T also routinely hands over customer information to the government, is under investigation for illegally selling customer location data to shady third parties, and is generally about as protective of your data as a hotel front desk guarding a bowl of mints.
AT&T can claim up and down that it’s asked for permission to use customer information to do this, but there is simply no possible way the average customer has ever even read their AT&T contracts, let alone puzzled out that they’re signing up to be permanently tracked and influenced by targeted media in this way. People are already convinced that Facebook is secretly listening to them through their phones; if you explicitly offered them the choice of AT&T tracking everything they watch and everywhere they go, it’s a safe bet that they would say no.
I would bet that as well; but, I also have a nagging worry that many consumers are becoming nihilistic about their privacy. People care, but I don’t think they feel like they have any control. Weak regulators are enabling this disconcerting direction.
Mike Masnick, Techdirt:
As you may have seen, last week we settled the lawsuit that Shiva Ayyadurai filed against us in early 2017. No money exchanged hands, but we did agree to post a link at the top of the 14 articles that he sued over. The text of that link says, “Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai’s Response to this Article and Statement on the Invention of Email.” You can read his link, and you can read our articles. As I’ve said in the past, I urge you to read both and make up your own mind.
Nothing in our settlement stops us from continuing to report on Shiva Ayyadurai’s claims to have invented email, and given that Ayyadurai has now fashioned himself a First Amendment freedom fighter, I am hopeful that he will be supportive of our use of our free expression rights to respond to his “response.”
What follows is a several-thousand word document on the history of email and its inventors. Masnick’s research indicates that Ayyadurai’s own recounting is internally flawed, and that no part of his claim to be the “inventor of email” withstands scrutiny.
By the way, Google still pretends that Ayyadurai invented email.
From the press release:
Today, after more than four years of work by a small and talented team, Panic is extremely excited to introduce Playdate, a brand new handheld gaming system.
Playdate is both very familiar, and totally new. It’s yellow, and fits perfectly in a pocket. It has a black-and-white screen with high reflectivity, a crystal-clear image, and no backlight. And of course, it has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB-C, and a headphone jack. But it also has a crank. Yes, a crank: a cute, rotating analog controller that flips out from the side. It’s literally revolutionary.
There’s more: Playdate includes games — a full season of them. The games will be delivered over-the-air, once a week for 12 weeks, and they’ll be a surprise: when the new game light flashes, you’ll never know what you’re about to play. Panic recruited some of the world’s best game designers — some well known; others under the radar — to make games exclusively for our system. Playdate isn’t just hardware: it’s a complete experience.
This looks completely wonderful and very, very Panic. They’re releasing it early next year for $149 USD. I’ve never had a handheld gaming system before — other than, like, an iOS device — but I think I might now.
Sam Biddle, the Intercept:
The source, who discussed Actionable Insights on the condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the press, explained that Facebook has offered the service to carriers and phone makers ostensibly of free charge, with access to Actionable Insights granted as a sweetener for advertising relationships. According to the source, the underlying value of granting such gratis access to Actionable Insights in these cases isn’t simply to help better service cell customers with weak signals, but also to ensure that telecoms and phone makers keep buying more and more carefully targeted Facebook ads. It’s exactly this sort of quasi-transactional data access that’s become a hallmark of Facebook’s business, allowing the company to plausibly deny that it ever sells your data while still leveraging it for revenue. Facebook may not be “selling” data through Actionable Insights in the most baldly literal sense of the word — there’s no briefcase filled with hard drives being swapped for one containing cash — but the relationship based on spending and monetization certainly fits the spirit of a sale. A Facebook spokesperson declined to answer whether the company charges for Actionable Insights access.
The confidential Facebook document provides an overview of Actionable Insights and espouses its benefits to potential corporate users. It shows how the program, ostensibly created to help improve underserved cellular customers, is pulling in far more data than how many bars you’re getting. According to one portion of the presentation, the Facebook mobile app harvests and packages eight different categories of information for use by over 100 different telecom companies in over 50 different countries around the world, including usage data from the phones of children as young as 13. These categories include use of video, demographics, location, use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, personal interests, device information, and friend homophily, an academic term of art. A 2017 article on social media friendship from the Journal of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology defined “homophily” in this context as “the tendency of nodes to form relations with those who are similar to themselves.” In other words, Facebook is using your phone to not only provide behavioral data about you to cellphone carriers, but about your friends as well.
Among the most vastly underreported stories in tech is Facebook’s unique ability to create deep associative data between users and those who did not consent to their privacy-invasive practices. It doesn’t matter if you do not use Facebook’s products; if any of your friends do, Facebook still knows a lot about you.
Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times:
“The success of Uber Eats, DoorDash and others suggests there is a demographic shift towards consumption of prepared meals at home,” said Michael Ronen, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “The time is now to try and stand up supply that is more efficient against that demand.”
Venture capitalists have all aligned on the best solution: kitchens that only serve delivery customers, known as “cloud”, “ghost” or “dark” kitchens, that use a combination of advanced food preparation, underused real estate and algorithm-driven optimisation to lower overheads and increase output.
There are companies that build these ghost kitchens, but they can spring up anywhere. A single storefront in strip mall here in Calgary is the address of thirteen restaurants, none of which you can actually eat at.
It is worth questioning, then, just what a restaurant is. Is it merely a kitchen with some chairs and tables attached to it, or is it more than that? Delivery-only restaurants are not a new thing, but they’re easier to promote as the use of food delivery apps increases.
I don’t think these restaurants replace sit-in dining. There will always be a market for a more formal dining room. And I don’t think they replace fast food restaurants, either, which serve impulse buys in person — something which these faceless kitchens can’t support. The optimistic result is that these restaurants will continue to rise and be an alternative as we increasingly treat cooking as a service. I worry, though, that the more likely scenario is that companies like Uber and Doordash will compete with restaurants directly.
See Also: Alexis C. Madrigal writing earlier this year in the Atlantic about the servant economy.
MG Siegler:
When I look at Apple’s recent stumbles — things like the aforementioned HomePod, the Mac Pro, the education market, the Airport, the Apple Stores, the strange recent events, the Apple TV, the Touch Bar, the entire line of new MacBook keyboards, and so on, I see a company that is failing to read the room. Again, a company that is directionally misguided in some areas, and the products (or lack thereof) simply showcase this.
My favourite products and services that Apple has done all sort of boil down to a single idea: they resolve the most complex near-universal frustrations through simplicity, elegance, and refinement. That sounds more hoity-toity than I intended, but it’s pretty accurate. You can associate this with the iPhone or the Mac or any of the other painfully trite examples, but I have my own pet favourite thing they’ve done in the last few years. They’ve practically gotten rid of passwords in two ways:
Your face, fingerprint, or device proximity is used to determine your identity. Rather than something you know, it’s something you are. If you use a recent Mac, iOS device, or Apple Watch, you can go password-free to unlock.
Apple can’t unilaterally replace passwords for the web and in apps, so they’ve done the next best thing by generating secure passwords, storing them, syncing them between devices, and making it all work with the face and fingerprint stuff above.1
This is reading the room perfectly. Not only does it resolve something irritating and complex, it does it in a near-seamless way and it encourages people to buy more Apple hardware, which ought to make the company’s stockholders very happy.
Many of the products that Siegler lists off don’t really do any of this. Not everything they release needs to be iPhone-calibre because I don’t think there’s likely to be another product of the iPhone’s calibre. It is likely the most successful manufactured good of all time.
The room is excited about Macs that are powerful and have bulletproof reliability. The room has been asking for a better Apple Store servicing experience. The room is looking for a sense that these products add up to something. There are indications that sometimes make me question what room Apple believes they are in.
Apple was not the first company to have a fingerprint scanner, nor a facial recognition system, nor a password manager. But they were likely the first and have done the best at integrating all of these things at the system level across multiple platforms. ↩︎
John Gruber:
But of course the biggest issue with these keyboards is reliability. Will this updated mechanism fix or at least greatly reduce the number of reliability problems? Only time will tell, but I’m cautiously optimistic. Apple didn’t have to say anything at all about this mechanical tweak. I mean, if they hadn’t said anything at all about the keyboards, we’d all be asking about it, but Apple often ignores questions it doesn’t want to answer. The folks I spoke to today seem confident these updated keyboards will prove significantly more reliable.
I’ve given this thing a little more thought because, as I wrote earlier, the only thing that gives us any indication that Apple has fixed the keyboard this time is their word. But that, I think, is itself newsworthy.
When Apple made keyboard tweaks last year, they insisted that the new silicone layer underneath all the keys was merely to make for quieter typing and had nothing to do with reliability. It doesn’t matter that their own servicing manual gave up its intended purpose; publicly, their stance was only that it was a quieter keyboard. This year, however, Apple directly addressed keyboard reliability in their conversations with media. Even though they didn’t mention keyboards at all in their press release, I still see it as a noteworthy acknowledgement.
Bruce Potter, writing on the Expel blog:
Many companies are only starting to come to grips with privacy thanks to new privacy regimes like the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA. And when you come to grips with a regulation, it typically looks a lot like compliance. “What boxes do I need to check in order to be compliant?” you might ask yourself. And once you’re compliant, you’re Good Enough™ and you move onto the next problem.
While taking a compliance-driven approach might feel like the equivalent of hitting an “easy” button, there’s one big problem: It leaves gaps in your org’s privacy posture that you’re probably not even aware of. The “compliance = security” mindset has been a problem for years, and industry analysts and journalists love reminding us after every breach that simply being compliant isn’t enough.
Turns out that privacy is no different.
NIST has made the current draft available (PDF) for feedback. It isn’t the easiest document to read, but it transforms the thinking around privacy from compliance to risk management. That’s a fundamental and critical shift that ought to encourage a greater appreciation by small- and medium-sized companies when it comes to privacy.
Jason Snell was briefed on the new MacBook Pro models, which feature some nice spec bumps and, more importantly, enhancements to the keyboards:
Apple says these new models also feature a fourth version of the butterfly keyboard design, in response to customer complaints that the keyboard would end up in a sad state where key presses were ignored or doubled. While Apple is quick to say that the vast majority of MacBook Pro customers haven’t experienced any keyboard issues, the company still keeps tweaking this design. It claims that the change made in these new MacBook Pro models will substantially reduce the incidence of ignored or doubled characters.
A post earlier this month from a Reddit user claiming to be an Apple authorized technician said that only some of the failures they were seeing were dust-related. They said that failures were more frequently found on computers belonging to heavy keyboard users — programmers, journalists, and students — and that failures were more frequently found with the space bar and vowel keys.
That all suggests that dust ingress was something Apple tried to rule out last year with the silicone membrane, and that it was ineffective because it was likely a fragility issue with the keyboards’ construction or materials. Dieter Bohn of the Verge says that Apple told them that they had, indeed, changed the keyboard’s build.
Snell:
Beyond that, Apple is also seeking to reassure its customers that they shouldn’t avoid buying a Mac laptop out of fear of having keyboard problems. As was reported last month, Apple is working to shorten the time it takes to repair keyboards in Apple Store. And today it’s extending its Keyboard Service Program to cover all laptops with butterfly keyboards, including not just these new MacBook Pros, but also all of its laptops released in 2018, including the new MacBook Air. That program is separate from the standard Apple warranty and covers keyboard repairs for four years after the first retail sale of the laptop.
Bohn:
Some current MacBook Pro 13-inch with Touch Bar and 15-inch customers that bring in their keyboards for repair will actually have their keyboards replaced with ones that have these new materials, Apple says. That will only happen for MacBooks that have the third-generation butterfly keyboard today: the 2018 models of the MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Air.
These are promising steps towards rebuilding trust that Apple actually cares about the time, cost, and effort incurred by customers to fix their laptops. Of course, I have little reason beyond Apple’s word to believe that this time these keyboards do not suck. We will see, of course, and I’m sure that anyone with a 2018 MacBook Pro or Air is probably breathing a sigh of relief that their keyboards will be replaced the revised design if and when they break.
Yet, these actions are no substitute for having a reliable keyboard. As far as I can tell, it is less a question of if and more a question of when any of Apple’s computers equipped with the “butterfly” keyboards will break.
Also, even though this keyboard can be substituted into Apple’s 2018 models, there’s no indication today that they’re shipping newly-built units from the factory with the new keyboard. Nor, it should be said, have the 13-inch non-Touch Bar model of the MacBook Pro or the 12-inch MacBook been updated with even the membrane-equipped keyboard.
In a nut, it is comforting to see that they appear to be taking seriously the repairs needed for butterfly keyboard-equipped MacBooks, and have updated the design to try to make the new ones more reliable. But that’s not enough. It isn’t too much to expect that the keyboard in a computer should not have design flaws that cause it to be likely unreliable over a multiyear lifespan of heavy use, and the MacBook line will not have a good keyboard until that baseline is reached.
Update: Apple has also started a service program for MacBook Pro models exhibiting the so-called “stage light” or “flexgate” — ugh — issue. Oddly, even though reports said that this issue could impact any 2016 or 2017 MacBook Pro model, Apple’s service program is only for 2016 13-inch units. If you’ve already paid for a repair, you can enquire about a refund.
I’m not a developer for any of Apple’s software platforms; and, so, WWDC usually comes every year as a welcome annual indication of where their platforms are headed, but I’m not compelled to fly down to San Jose, book a hotel room, and file for bankruptcy. This year, though, I’m getting the feeling that I should be there. I don’t know why, but there’s something in the air this year that seems just a little different — and I like it.
For old times’ sake, I wanted to put together one of those part-retrospective part-speculative pieces where I point out some of the new things I’d like to see this year. Maybe some of these things will be introduced, and that would be cool; I wouldn’t bet on too much of this list, though. These are just a few things that have been swirling in my head.
Here’s something remarkable: the design language that emerged from the iOS 7 upheaval has now been with us for the same amount of time as its glossier and more colourful predecessor on iOS. Of course, that alone should not dictate whether it is time for a new coat of paint — to my eyes, this aesthetic is holding up far better than the last one at about the same time in its life.1 In part, that’s because Apple has done a good job updating it in the intervening years: switching to their custom San Francisco typeface, for example, and introducing some big, bold typography in iOS 11. Since iOS 7’s ship date, there’s nothing in the system that has felt so instantly tacky as, say, the metallic action buttons in the iOS 6 sharing sheet.
Yet, for everything that iOS 7 did right in setting Apple up for creating software that looks and works like it matches their hardware, there are some things that have never sat right with me. I don’t think shapeless buttons have ever been a good idea. They look unfinished, unanchored, and uncharacteristically sloppy; I am dismayed that they have stayed virtually the same for six years. I’ve also never been fond of any of the glyph-on-a-white-background icons that shipped in iOS 7, save for Photos. That is a beautiful illustration. The rest — Music, Reminders, Home, Calendar, Files, Health, Find My iPhone, and (if we’re being generous with the definition of “white background”) Calculator — are drab things that I have mostly buried in assorted folders on the second through fourth pages of my iPhone’s home screen.
I also think this would be a great time to revisit some of the more delightful spit-and-polish qualities of visual interface design. I was thinking recently about Time Machine — more on that below. Backing up a computer is a mundane task; finding and restoring a deleted file can be very stressful, particularly if it’s an important document. Time Machine somehow made this dreadful part of computing enjoyable. But, not everything about Time Machine was good. I remember my irritation any time I accidentally clicked on its Dock icon and watching helplessly as my entire computer — a mid-2007 MacBook Pro; so, brand new when Leopard shipped — ground to a halt to render some stars over a swirling nebula backdrop.
So, while I am not necessarily eager to return to an era of photorealistically-rendered window textures and glossy everything, I would love to see a middle ground. The “card” that pops up when you connect your AirPods or share a WiFi network’s password is, I think, very elegant, particularly on my iPhone X where the corner radius is matched to the screen’s, making it feel like an extension of the phone itself. I do wish the button were a gorgeous saturated blue, though. The revised design of Wallet in iOS 12.2 is also very nice; I welcome the return of enclosed cells in table views. Refinement throughout the system to add a little more colour and visual cues would also be delightful. The “Backup and Restore” section of Apple’s iCloud marketing webpage includes screenshots of some of the most dreary visual patterns in iOS. More spit-and-polish, better use of colour, and more elegance will always be welcomed in visual design.
I’d also like to see more attention to detail in not allowing obvious sloppiness to be shipped.
We’ve had an era of sorely needed recalibration from excessive and overwrought visual design patterns. Let’s inject a feeling of craft and beauty back into the software we use, though. Apps like Things illustrate a fantastic interpretation of how a less decorative design language can still be lively and tactile.
Beyond the more surface-level stuff, there are some functional changes I’d like to see in iOS. More specifically, I have different hopes for each the iPhone and the iPad.
First, a quick observation: it’s remarkable just how much Apple got completely right with the first iPhone’s user interface. The tab bar that runs across the bottom of many apps is, I think, a brilliant piece of foresight. From the 3.5-inch displays of the first four generations of iPhone to the windowpane of glass that is the iPhone XS Max, it has scaled beautifully.
But the stuff at the top of the display — app toolbars, notifications, Notification Centre, and Control Centre — is something I think sorely needs reconsidering. There have been moves made to this effect for several years. Keen observers of third-party app design trends on iOS will remember that the downfall of the then-ubiquitous “hamburger” menu began around the time that Plus-model iPhones became popular. iOS 7 also launched a universal gesture for paging back by swiping from the left edge of the screen, which became immensely useful on larger-screened iPhones.
But that still leaves a few remaining gestures that require a telescopic thumb. And, I should point out, I still think it’s ridiculous that notifications are positioned to overlap the upper toolbar of pretty much every app. On a semi-frequent basis, my thumb will go to hit some control at the top of the display only to have a notification pop in, so when my thumb contacts the display, I get whisked off to some other app. It’s not a very good game.
On the bigger side of the iOS device spectrum, I am anticipating improvements to the iPad’s home screen and its multitasking capabilities. As was reported early last year by Mark Gurman — and which I have heard separately as well — the iPad improvements that were supposed to debut with iOS 12 were bumped as a result of that update’s increased focus on stability and speed. With another year of polish, I’m looking forward to seeing what may be in store.
Perhaps better indication of which app in a split view is foregrounded, particularly when an external keyboard is used.
Maybe the home screen will have more flexibility in what can be placed on it and how those items can be arranged.
Or maybe it will soon be possible to run more than one instance of an app, so you can pull up a couple of Pages documents side-by-side to more easily work with both of them. Even having more complex layouts like that which recently debuted in Fiery Feeds would be a boon.
This would be really a great year for Siri, Notification Centre, and Control Centre to stop taking over the entire display when invoked, and the same for the whole-screen dominance of an incoming phone call. Hey, a guy can dream.
Overall, I’d like to see great understanding that a single task often requires referencing multiple things across several apps. Part of that can be resolved through UI changes. However, I’d also like the system to do a better job of holding multiple apps in memory. iOS, as I understand it, has a far more limited virtual memory system than MacOS. That, combined with less RAM, means that apps in the background are frequently kicked out of memory and must be reloaded. This can be deeply interruptive when working in multiple apps at once, and it’s something I’ve never seen on MacOS. It’s so interruptive to me that I will often be working on something on my iPad only to find it has, once again, kicked all my Safari tabs out of memory after I checked my email or responded to a text; at that point, I find it easier to simply switch to my Mac.
The biggest Mac news of WWDC this year will almost certainly be a new Mac Pro. It makes total sense to introduce it to a developer audience, even if it isn’t available soon after — though I hope it is. While I doubt they will acknowledge the failure of the last Mac Pro, I hope to hear Apple make the case for the feasibility of updating the new one more frequently than once every seven years.
I am also looking forward to the display that it will reportedly be paired with. Fifteen years ago, Apple defined what a professional-grade desktop display ought to be with the 30-inch Cinema Display. I would not be disappointed if the new display is a 5K 27-inch model — there is certainly a dearth of those — but I would love to be surprised by a product that’s the spiritual successor of the 30-inch Cinema Display: some gigantic, high-resolution thing with that isn’t available anywhere else. Technology permitting, of course.
It’s unlikely, but I would also like to see an acknowledgement of the failure of their “butterfly” keyboard design that is currently shipping in every portable Mac they make. These keyboards are terrible. I’ve seen frustration with these keyboards referenced increasingly in non-tech circles, so news is spreading that Apple’s laptops aren’t fully reliable.
On the software front, I am mostly concerned about the next stage of the so-called “Marzipan” apps. The four apps that have been released so far are not good, and are poor examples for the developer community. I am cautiously optimistic about what we could see this year, though. These apps were clearly stopgap proofs-of-concept that, arguably, shouldn’t have shipped, and my hope is that we’ll see truly Mac-like iterations of these and other apps this year. I don’t want iOS apps running with a MacOS title bar to be the new standard.
That’s not to say that all things from iOS do not or could not work on the Mac. In particular, the effects introduced in Messages and FaceTime on iOS should absolutely be brought to the Mac as well. I get why Animoji and Memoji can’t be on the Mac — yet — but surely I should be able to send and receive messages with the laser effect, or use some goofy FaceTime filters.
From a services perspective, I hope this is the year that we see an iCloud-powered Time Machine backup option. It has always struck me as very odd how Apple banged the drum for years about how easy backups are on the Mac with Time Machine, but never evolved it. Even if you count document versioning as an update to Time Machine, there have been virtually no updates to it since the version that shipped with Lion eight years ago. In that time, the biggest Time Machine-related news was the discontinuation of the Time Capsule a couple of years back. That means that users of Apple’s notebooks either need to remember to plug in a hard drive, or they need to know about Backblaze or another third-party remote backup service. Yet, Apple sells iCloud plans offering up to two terabytes of storage, and recommends switching on iCloud backups for iOS devices when they are set up. I want the same thing for my Mac.
Finally, there are still features that haven’t made their way into iCloud despite being available in Apple’s previous online subscription services. Because I now have two Macs, it would be great to be able to sync everything from app preferences to my Dock layout between both machines. These are things that don’t often change but, when they do, it’s likely that I want that setting applied on both. iCloud is most of the way there already, with features like Documents and Desktop syncing, iCloud Keychain, and automatic downloads from Apple’s stores — I’d just like to see a last push.
Something I’m aching for with my Apple TV is better support for multiple users. I know this has been a perennial request by owners of family-used iPads, but I think it makes even more sense on the Apple TV and, presumably, HomePod, as they are inherently communal devices. The Apple TV in our house is signed into my Apple ID because it was the one with the Apple Music subscription before we sorted all that out. Both my partner and I play music with the Apple Music app and, while we have similar tastes in a lot of areas, her picks have definitely skewed my recommendations a little.
Netflix solves this by allowing one account to have several profiles. I wish Apple’s apps would allow switching between accounts in the same iCloud Family.
I also think Apple could do a better job of defining what makes a great app for tvOS. I’ve previously complained about the YouTube app and I still feel very strongly that it is a bad app. But so, too, is Music in its own way: when it resumes, it bumps whatever album was last playing to the front of your Recently Played list, even if that album is paused or stopped; the For You page reloads as you move around; the entire app is slow and navigating it is poor.
Finally, one thing I’d like to see more generally is a greater focus on unification of product and service availability no matter where users live. I recognize that there are regulatory hurdles and licensing restrictions that make this difficult — if not impossible — but, as a non-American, this is important to me.
A caveat: the original iPhone UI was clearly a descendent of the Aqua design language that was Apple’s standard since Mac OS X debuted in 2001. So perhaps it’s a bit premature to declare the iOS 7 visual language the same age; but, on the iPhone, it is. Also, the iOS 7 language was never named. ↩︎
Dell Cameron, Gizmodo:
How the intimate data exchanging hands in these back-alley deals compares in size and scale to, say, what Cambridge Analytica acquired on Facebook users in 2016 is ultimately made irrelevant by the fact that it’s a thousand times more sensitive. This is data meant for hunting people down. In the most outrageous case documented by the press so far, a Motherboard reporter managed to pay a bounty hunter $300 to put a trace on a cellphone in New York. The coordinates he received provided accurate up to around a quarter mile. As one Democrat on the FCC put it, the trade in Americans’ location data is “a personal and national security issue that affects every American with a cell phone.”
There’s little evidence that it’s being treated as such. Lawmakers on Wednesday openly scolded [FCC Chairman Ajit] Pai over his handling of the investigation, which is thought to be nearing the end of its first year. (It remains unclear when the investigation was actually started.) During questioning, he refused outright to say whether he’d share basic information about the investigation with the FCC’s two Democratic commissioners, Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks.
Who knows? This could all be nothing; Pai’s office could just be bad at email. In that case, I sympathize.
But if this is a case of what appears to be partisan nonsense, it’s deeply troubling. These carriers were providing third parties access to customers’ real-time location data. That’s an unconscionable violation of privacy; I don’t think anyone would disagree. It would be an egregious breach of duty for the FCC investigate this without urgency or priority.
Of course, this is the Republican Party serving the doctrine of Donald Trump, so there are always gratuitous conflicts of interest or the potential for grift:
Statutorily, the FCC has one year in most cases from the date of a violation to issue a notice of apparent liability. Neither commissioner can say whether the statute of limitation has expired on any particular infraction. But notably, more than a year has passed since Senator Ron Wyden first wrote to the FCC demanding this investigation take place. A New York Times expose about a business that sold phone-tracking services to state law enforcement officials without a warrant turned a year old last week. (Pai, incidentally, represented that business — Securus Technologies — seven years ago, while working in private practice.)
Shocking.
Terence Eden:
I don’t like AMP. I think that Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages are a bad idea, poorly executed, and almost-certainly anti-competitive.
So, I decided to join the AC (Advisory Committee) for AMP. I don’t want them surrounded with sycophants and yes-men. A few weeks ago, a bunch of the AC met in London for our first physical meeting after several exploratory video calls.
I maintain that AMP is antithetical to the open web, and a stealthy anticompetitive threat. If Google did not restrict the top “carousel” of news results on mobile to AMP pages, I doubt it would have ever caught on. It has few merits of its own and is popular solely because it has been given undue weight due to Google’s influence.
Scrap it. Take what good albeit obvious lessons have been learned from AMP — limits on asset size, no arbitrary scripts, simpler page structures — and sink its corpse to the seabed of our collective conscience.