Month: September 2013

Gruber’s Thoughts and Observations on Today’s iPhone 5C and 5S Introduction ⇥ daringfireball.net

Mr. Fireball:

Yes, it’s plastic, but there’s nothing cheap about it. It has a far better fit and finish, and feels way better in your hand, than Apple’s previous foray into plastic iPhones, the 3G and 3GS. The 5C feels like a premium product.

In 2008, the iPhone 3G was — by far — the best smartphone on the market, but I refused to buy one. The plastic simply felt cheap. There are good-feeling plastics, and there are nasty-feeling plastics. This assuages my worries about the 5C.

On the 5S:

Now that they’ve gone 64-bit, I’ve got to start wondering about ARM-based MacBooks in the near future.

I was avoiding that speculation, but it’s the fourth reason Apple might want to go to 64-bit with the A-series processors. The more Apple designs in-house, the better they can ensure everything works together seamlessly.

Grab Bag From Today’s Event ⇥ apple.com

This is going to be a sort of haphazard roundup of other things that happened today.

As noted in the press releases for both the iPhone 5S and 5C, Apple is making the iWork, iMovie, and iPhoto apps free downloads for new iPhones and iPads. This is a very clever move; Microsoft also provides Office for free on its Surface RT, but not on the Surface Pro. And nobody else has anything like iMovie or iPhoto.

The event today felt a bit weird, for two reasons:

  1. It was very, very fast. The whole thing was over in just an hour, and it felt a bit rushed. Tim Cook didn’t run down as many numbers as he usually does, and the “public” (non-developer) announcement of iOS 7 was crammed into less than ten minutes of stage time. I suppose this is a counter to the glut of most other tech press conferences, but it was almost too fast and too lean.
  2. This is the first non-music event that I can remember which was closed with a musical performance, this time by Elvis Costello. This is usually reserved for events where iPods are refreshed or iTunes is updated; the closest they came to that was a short demo of iTunes Radio.

There’s a ton of product information in the video, though, and I recommend it if you’ve got an hour to spare.

Speaking of iPods, Apple rolled out the “space grey” finish from the iPhone 5S to the Touch, Nano, and Shuffle. The lack of even a cursory mention during the keynote and the subtlety with which these models were released demonstrates how insignificant the iPod now is to “the iPod company”.

Apple also modified their AppleCare+ terms today:

… the price for each accidental-damage iPhone repair has increased from $49 per incident to $79. (You’re allowed two such repairs over the two-year life of the plan.) The price of iPad accidental-damage repairs appears to be unchanged at $49 per incident.

Assuming you used both available repairs, the total cost of $197 (including the $99 plan) always seemed a bit too cheap to me, as you’re effectively getting two new iPhones.

AppleCare+ is now available for two iPod models, too:

The iPod touch is a natural candidate for AppleCare+ coverage, thanks to its just-as-easy-to-crack-as-an-iPhone’s screen and nearly identical form factor. And the iPod classic, as the one mechanical hard drive-based iPod left, is a natural fit—it’s only a drop away from total failure.

And I thought the Classic was dead.

Dan Frommer is concerned about supply:

“We sold every iPhone we could make” is only a “good problem to have” to a certain point, and then it suggests that you should probably do a better job at making more iPhones. (Then again, Tim Cook is supposed to be the best in the world at this, so maybe the real limitation is reality. Still.)

I do wonder how this will play out. Consider the amount of SKUs:

  • 45 for the iPhone 5S (5 models, 3 colours, and 3 capacities);
  • 50 for the iPhone 5C (5 models, 5 colours, and 2 capacities).

Including the remarkably-alive iPhone 4S, that’s a total of 97 SKUs. This time last year, Apple had to contend with just 22 (18 for the iPhone 5, and 2 for each the iPhone 4 and 4S). That’s a lot of different individual product configurations, which is a supply chain nightmare. But, as Frommer mentioned, Cook is the best at this stuff, so hopefully this gets sorted out in time for the mad holiday rush.

Finally, there are a few enhancements to iOS 7 which were not present in the betas. It will be released on September 18, when I’ll post my full review.

Two Week Old Chowder ⇥ twitter.com

Clayton Morris, August 25:

Sources are telling me the new iPhone’s A7 chip is running at about 31% faster than A6. I’m hearing it’s very fast.

Turns out it’s twice as fast in CPU, and twice as fast in graphics performance, compared to the iPhone 5. Which, by the way, doubled the iPhone 4S’ performance. Which, by the way, doubled the iPhone 4’s CPU performance and delivered seven times greater graphics performance.

That’s a lot of doubling.

The C is for Colour, Not Cheap ⇥ apple.com

The less-expensive iPhone is here. It’s priced at a hundred bucks less than an equivalent iPhone 5 model which, given the pricing of the iPhone 5S, tells me that the component cost hasn’t come down significantly in the past year. I’d also suspect that the manufacturing process for the metal-and-glass back of the 5(S) is just as expensive and fiddly as it was a year ago, explaining the discrepancy between these three price points.

Why the focus on pricing? Well, while the iPhone 5C is positioned as the lower-cost model, it isn’t cheap. But that’s okay. Let’s take a gander back to 2004 when Apple introduced the iPod Mini, which commentators proclaimed far too expensive; it turned out that Apple sold them as fast as they could make them.

I’d be willing to bet the iPhone 5C is going to be the same story all over again. It’s not the price that’s necessarily going to sell it — though that will help — but the colours and style. It’s the fun model, in contrast to the 5S’ serious, businesslike design. That’s very appealing.

There’s a good reason why Apple produced a product video for the 5C, but not for the 5S. The latter received two “features” videos, for the fingerprint sensor and the camera.

There’s a good reason why Apple displays the 5C first on both the home page and the iPhone landing page.

And there’s a very good reason why Apple is allowing preorders on the 5C, but not for the 5S. You can bet this thing is going to sell like crazy.

Would I buy one? Yes, if the white model were available with 64 GB of storage.

Also, the case’s circular holes are kind of stupid, and I don’t understand why “non” appears through one of the holes, masked from part of the “iPhone” text on the back.

Apple Announces iPhone 5S ⇥ apple.com

There are an awful lot of new features in this update, even for iPhone 5 users; for iPhone 4S users like myself, this is huge. I’m not going to go over all of the features, but I wanted to touch on one in particular, as there seems to be a lot of people confused about what benefits it brings:

The all-new A7 chip in iPhone 5s brings 64-bit desktop-class architecture to a smartphone for the first time. With up to twice the CPU and graphics performance, almost everything you do on iPhone 5s is faster and better than ever, from launching apps and editing photos to playing graphic-intensive games—all while delivering great battery life. Apple also engineered iOS 7 and all the built-in apps to maximize the performance of the A7 chip. iPhone 5s is the best mobile gaming device with access to hundreds of thousands of games from the App Store℠, the A7 chip’s 64-bit architecture and support for OpenGL ES version 3.0. iPhone 5s delivers incredibly rich and complex visual effects, previously only possible on Macs, PCs and gaming consoles.

An awful lot of the comments I’ve seen today are iterations on the “64-bit architectures allow apps to address more than 4GB of memory” trope. “What benefit is that in a phone?”, most seem to ask.

First, it’s important to know that this isn’t the only benefit of a 64-bit architecture. Integers and mathematical functions can contain up to twice as many bits. Since math plays a large role in certain kinds of apps, such as photo editors or games, an app which has been optimized for a 64-bit architecture will likely run substantially faster and smoother. However, due to the larger integer values, apps may consume more memory running as 64-bit than they would under 32-bit. This will be an important consideration for developers seeking to optimize their app for both architectures. In addition, an app which syncs to iCloud will now need to be able to support compatibility with itself running on either architecture.

The second misconception is that the A7 will only benefit the iPhone. It is exceedingly likely that this year’s iPad refresh will also contain the A7 SoC. As Apple continues to position the iPad as a product which can replace a PC a lot of the time, a more substantial architecture will be important to bringing some of the more hardcore kinds of desktop apps to the iPad. Scientific apps will especially benefit from a 64-bit architecture.

Finally, this is an early step towards future-proofing the iOS ecosystem. While not all developers will port their apps this year, this is a start for when it becomes necessary for them to do so. Apple is publicly giving developers both time and a working platform for them to start on this optimization early. The world isn’t going to be 32-bit forever, even on mobile products.

There are tonnes of other new features as well. Federico Viticci wrote up the best overview, highlighting the M7 “motion coprocessor” in particular:

Another upside of contextual awareness is that Apple apps will use the M7 coprocessor in interesting new ways. For instance, the iOS 7 Maps app will be able to automatically switch from driving to walking directions if you park your car and continue on foot; or, when driving, the iPhone 5s will understand that it’s in a moving car and it won’t ask to join WiFi networks. If the M7 tells the iPhone 5s that you’re likely asleep because the iPhone hasn’t moved in a while, network ping will be reduced to increase battery life.

And, while the S in “3GS” stood for “speed”, and in “4S” it stood for “Siri”, in the 5S, it’s for “security”. The much-rumoured fingerprint sensor is embedded in the redesigned sapphire home button, and it’s apparently nearly instantaneous. Apparently, the print is stored in hardware, is encrypted, isn’t available to software, and is never uploaded to Apple’s servers.

As with previous S-suffixed models, Apple has markedly increased the quality of the camera. There are too many features to go over in great detail; I recommend Viticci’s overview for more.

Also very important is the availability (again) of a dock. Sorry, Schiller; the people wanted one.

Not very important is the lack of capitalization on the suffixes. Apple now stylizes models as “iPhone 5s” and “iPhone 5c”. This is in line with the capitalization they use across their other products (“iPod touch”, “iPod nano”, “iPad mini”), but I refuse to use it. It just looks weird.

My biggest complaint with the 5S is the pricing. I’m not usually one to complain about that sort of thing — you usually get what you pay for — but it’s egregious this year. Here’s a table showing pricing in select countries for the off-contract 16 GB model:

Country 2013 Price Price, USD Δ 2012
USA $649 $649 0
Canada $719 $694 +$20
UK £549 $863 +£20
Australia $869 $809 +$70
France and Germany €699 $927 +€20
China RMB 5288 $864 0

While the US suffered no pricing change, most countries saw theirs increase by 20 of the local currency, compared to the iPhone 5 price; Australia, on the other hand, suffered a $70 bump. The French and the Germans now pay the equivalent of nearly a thousand dollars for a 16 GB iPhone 5S, while buyers in the all-important China market pay over 30% more than US buyers for the same product (though there hasn’t been an increase over 2012 pricing). Apple also raised prices in 2012, yet their profit margin decreased. I do wonder how it will fare this time.

Would I buy one? Yes. I’m not a fan of the gold colour (though, I hear it’s not as ostentatious as you’d expect), and I’m not sure I’d like another white one. Looks like the black 64 GB model is in my future, though at $919 CAD, it’s certainly on the pricey side.

Lots of exciting stuff today. More to come here.

Update: Many of the European price points include tax, which explains the discrepancy when converted to USD. However, the Canadian price does not include tax, and is $50 more than the US pricing.

On Recent Apple Parts Leaks ⇥ macgasm.net

Joshua Schnell, for the unfortunately-named Macgasm:

The Internet has been taken by storm the last couple weeks. Every tech blog on the planet has been providing high resolutions photos of the impending iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, and iPad mini 2 (even more random shit was “leaked” today). Apple’s set to take the stage tomorrow to release these alleged products, and we think it’s time to spill the beans on where all these images are coming from and who these “sources” are that we keep hearing about. Heads up, it’s not Apple, nor is it someone in an Apple factory somewhere.

How the NSA Spies on Smartphones ⇥ spiegel.de

The pertinent bit for people who read this website will likely be this:

The access to such material varies, but much of it passes through an NSA department responsible for customized surveillance operations against high-interest targets. One of the US agents’ tools is the use of backup files established by smartphones. According to one NSA document, these files contain the kind of information that is of particular interest to analysts, such as lists of contacts, call logs and drafts of text messages. To sort out such data, the analysts don’t even require access to the iPhone itself, the document indicates. The department merely needs to infiltrate the target’s computer, with which the smartphone is synchronized, in advance.

Basically, the NSA has figured out that ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup exists, and that if they have access to a target computer, they can extract content from this directory. This is yet another reason to encrypt your iPhone backup.

The Internet Didn’t Kill the Newspaper ⇥ theconversation.com

George Brock:

More newspapers were killed off by the coming of television from the 1950s onwards than have ever been closed by competition from the internet.

The internet made things worse for newspapers and was lethal to classified advertising income. But the decline of print began before the internet was built.

A surprising — and perhaps controversial — argument.

Bullshitapalooza ⇥ propublica.org

The office of the Director of National Intelligence sent ProPublica a statement in response to yesterday’s edition of the 2013 NSA-palooza:

Anything that yesterday’s disclosures add to the ongoing public debate is outweighed by the road map they give to our adversaries about the specific techniques we are using to try to intercept their communications in our attempts to keep America and our allies safe and to provide our leaders with the information they need to make difficult and critical national security decisions.

Remember the Washington Post’s story on the bin Laden mission?

The National Security Agency also was able to penetrate guarded communications among al-Qaeda operatives by tracking calls from mobile phones identified by specific calling patterns, the document shows.

The most careful (read: dangerous) terrorists don’t use Skype. They’ve assumed that the NSA and CIA are watching electronic communications since before Snowden’s disclosures. Consider the above sentence: the NSA helped to find bin Laden by identified calling patterns, not by breaking the encryption on a Skype call.

The main question here is whether it’s worth sacrificing the privacy of any communications that pass through the United States — bank transactions, login information, email messages, text messages, etc. — in the hope that they will able to be cross-referenced and a terrorist cell will be busted. Simply, what’s the signal-to-noise ratio?

There are other questions, too. How much more must be sacrificed to an agency with little oversight which may or may not be able to put the pieces of a terrorist plot together before they hit? How many lives have been saved so far by sacrificing our privacy? How many lives have been lost despite these sacrifices? Why can’t this technology be targeted better so the vast majority of us do not have to give up our privacy?

Furthermore, if all of this has the ability to target Americans, isn’t that unconstitutional? Or, if it doesn’t target Americans, why not? Is domestic terrorism not considered a valid threat? If the Constitution protects civil liberties for Americans, are those who are not American inherently lesser people who are unworthy of the same rights?

Sour Grapes ⇥ theawl.com

I’m not sure who looks worse after this: TechCrunch or Elite Daily. Both seem pretty scummy, though for completely different reasons.

Sorry for wrecking your Friday afternoon, by the way.

R-I-P-O-F-F ⇥ insidemobileapps.com

Brandy Shaul, Inside Mobile Apps:

The turn-based word game presents two players with a Boggle-style game board of randomized letter tiles. It then asks those players to claim as many of those tiles for themselves as they can, by making words that include each one. The same word can’t be used more than once in the same game, and tiles will become locked if matching tiles of the same color surround them.

Each turn sees players creating words of any length, turning those letters either red or blue, depending on the player. When the last letter on the board has been claimed, the game ends and the player with the most colored tiles on the board is declared the winner.

Oh, you thought this was an article about Letterpress? Nope:

Mobile game developer Scopely has already found great success with its newest game on iOS and Android, Wordly, which hit No. 1 on the Top Free Apps charts within 24 hours of launching on iOS.

Jackasses.

Say Goodbye to the iPod Classic ⇥ wired.com

Its death has been predicted perennially since the launch of the iPod Touch. I thought it would be dropped on its tenth anniversary, but that time was marked by the death of Steve Jobs, so it would have seemed rather cruel.

It’s been kept in the lineup for the two years since. Apple doesn’t seem like a sentimental sort of company, so it must be selling well enough for them to keep producing it. And yet, it’s probably time for it to be killed off.

Fingerprints ⇥ furbo.org

Craig Hockenberry, on the rumoured fingerprint sensor in the upcoming iPhone:

Imagine needing to type in a eight character password with letters and numerals just to check the current weather. That’s a reality for millions of people who use their device for both personal and business tasks.

A fingerprint scanner that avoids this complex password will sell a lot of devices.

Yep. I would give a substantial amount of money to never type in a passcode again while also retaining a modicum of security. A fingerprint sensor in the home button sounds like a perfect solution. Even if it had up to a 10% failure rate — that is, one out of every ten unlock attempts fails — that would still be better than I typically manage with my passcode. A typically-Apple level of integration would make it a killer feature.

One of the Missing Pieces in the NSA/Encryption Reporting ⇥ wired.com

While the reporting by the Guardian, Times, and ProPublica was first-rate, the general-audience nature of those publications omitted some of the more technical details of how the NSA is bypassing encryption standards. Well, that, and the intelligence agencies concerned asked the news agencies not to report these findings.

A more detailed story about a new TSL encryption standard, for example, appeared in Wired in 2007. Bruce Schneier:

Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry about a new random-number standard that includes an algorithm that is slow, badly designed and just might contain a backdoor for the National Security Agency.

Schneier apparently has access to the documents provided by Edward Snowden. I’m excited for the potential of a more technical breakdown, in addition to these high-level summaries. I suspect that there’s a lot more to be revealed.

NSA Foils Internet Encryption ⇥ nytimes.com

Remember how you were going to work around the nastiness of the NSA spying programs by encrypting the stuff you put online? Tough shit, as reported by the New York Times:

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

HTTPS? SSH? VPN? VoIP? SSL? All cracked wide open. Doesn’t that make you feel more secure, and help you sleep at night?

As I’ve said before, I understand the perceived need to try to get out ahead of those who are trying to do grave danger to a country. By investing so heavily into intercepting and decrypting the communications of average Americans and all internet traffic that passes through the United States, the NSA has stepped into the contemporary signal cracking arena. But is a wartime agency built to crack enemy signals still necessary in 2013? Terrorists don’t use Skype, and the signal-to-noise ratio of capturing this much data can’t be great.

If you’re extremely concerned and/or paranoid, security analyst extraordinaire Bruce Schneier has put together a short list of countermeasures against NSA tapping. Perhaps most important is his third bullet-point:

Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA – so it probably isn’t. If you have something really important, use an air gap. Since I started working with the Snowden documents, I bought a new computer that has never been connected to the internet. If I want to transfer a file, I encrypt the file on the secure computer and walk it over to my internet computer, using a USB stick. To decrypt something, I reverse the process. This might not be bulletproof, but it’s pretty good.

You’re probably not a target. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t be at all concerned, but it would take a great deal of work for the NSA to start targeting anyone who has ever used Limewire or BitTorrent. The paradox of them collecting so much data and being as invasive as they are is that they have to be extremely particular in how they comb through all that they have collected.

New Logo for Yahoo Designed In-House ⇥ underconsideration.com

Armin Vit, Brand New:

So, the stunt was mostly just a stunt but it worked in creating expectation and giving Yahoo some momentum into launching its logo. The problem is: the result did not deliver. Showing mildly venturesome graphic approaches throughout the 29 days gave me hope that there would be something radically cool at the end of the process. There wasn’t.

I really liked the thirty-days stunt; there were some interesting and clever logos presented during the past month. But this result is weak. Some of the justification simply doesn’t make sense. Take Marissa Mayer’s blog post:

We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don’t exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve.

Yet:

We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark.

Natural and mathematical. No straight lines, but consistency abound. Every line has a slight curve, though. Or consider the explanation video, complete with an underlying grid for each letter.

The problem is that all of this is bullshit. The logo is set in a barely-modified version of Optima. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, by the way; Aston Martin’s logo uses Optima. But for a company named “Yahoo”,1 you’d think there would be a sense of fun and excitement to the logo, and Optima doesn’t really convey that. Indeed, there are two other famous places where that typeface is used: on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the September 11 Memorial. Rotating the exclamation mark precisely 9° doesn’t exactly restore any fun.

Furthermore, while Optima looks great and kinda quirky in large sizes, all of that detailing is lost when it’s rendered at the typical size visitors to Yahoo will see it.

The new Yahoo logo is better than the old one, though. I like the faux bevelling on the white-on-purple treatment (it’s less successful with the purple text). But the lead-up of teaser logos was so promising as to render this decidedly underwhelming.

Update In an article in Advertising Age, a Yahoo spokesperson claimed that this is a proprietary font:

The new typeface is one unique to Yahoo. “We always knew that we wanted to develop our own proprietary font, and that this would be intellectual property that would come from Yahoo, from our design team,” Ms. Savitt said. And so they did (though Yahoo’s new font doesn’t yet have its own name).

Bullshit. It’s Optima, and any attempt to state otherwise is dishonest.

  1. Or, really, “Yahoo!”, but I break out in a cold sweat when I type that exclamation point. ↥︎

OmniKeyMaster Update ⇥ omnigroup.com

Ken Case of the Omni Group shares the bad news:

So long as we continue to sell our apps through the Mac App Store, we are not allowed to distribute updates through other channels to apps which were purchased from the App Store.

Sounds like a stupid App Store policy. Where the App Store model was a boon on mobile devices, it’s lacking for the desktop paradigm for any sort of power user app.