Month: January 2015

From the “Too Much Encryption Will Kill Apple in India” File ⇥ telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com

Remember how too much encryption killed BlackBerry, according to the NSA’s general counsel? And how that would mean Apple would be totally slaughtered in countries like, say, India? Writankar Mukherjee, of the Economic Times:

Preliminary estimates suggest Apple sold half a million iPhones in the October-December period in India, said Tarun Pathak, senior analyst at market research company Counterpoint Research.

The sales number is corroborated by two leading trade partners of Apple in India. That figure compares with one million iPhones sold in India in the year to September 2014.

Apple doubled their sales rate in India. Positively slaughtered.

The Software and Services Apple Needs to Fix ⇥ glog.glennf.com

Glenn Fleishman, writing on his Glog:¹

Part of what makes these sorts of statements reasonable, though, is to enumerate the problems, whether they’re long-running or unique to Yosemite or iOS 8 or to the last two releases of each system. Here’s a list of regularly recurring issues or fundamental problems I’ve seen supplemented by those provided by others.

Any time I find an article with “Apple Needs” in the title, I immediately begin to doubt it. There’s something inherently obnoxious about anyone telling one of the world’s largest companies what it “needs” to fix, largely because such articles are often proved not just a little wrong, but 180° wrong.

But I agree with so much in this list. The fact that many of the software issues can be enumerated in a single post gives the impression that there really aren’t that many, but closer inspection reveals that so many of these problems are rudimentary. Frequent and serious WiFi connectivity issues, for example, are completely unacceptable in an era when Apple has removed an ethernet connection from most of its notebooks.

Skeuomorphism Is Like a Classic Car ⇥ appdocumentary.com

On this day, the iPhone’s eighth birthday, what better thing to link to than a clip from the upcoming documentary “App” featuring the always-affable Neven Mrgan?

Minimum iOS App Store Prices Rise Internationally ⇥ appleinsider.com

AppleInsider:

As a result of the changes, the minimum app price in Canada is now $1.19, £0.79 in the U.K., and €0.99 in the E.U. Similar increases are expected in Norway and Russia, while prices are set to see a decrease in Iceland.

Think these prices will go back down when the US dollar gets weaker, or the other currencies get stronger?

Eight Years Ago, Apple Introduced an “Innovative Cellphone” ⇥ nytimes.com

Remember how shortsighted those articles seem from when the World Wide Web was invented? Those kinds of articles are always funny in hindsight. John Markoff’s reporting for the Times is chock full of great quotes, like this:

[Jobs] said Apple had set the goal of taking 1 percent of the world market for cellphones by the end of 2008. That may seem small, but with a billion handsets sold last year worldwide, that would mean 10 million iPhones — a healthy supplement to the 39 million iPods that Apple sold last year.

And this:

“At $499 and $599, it’s a pretty expensive deal,” said Rob Glaser, chief executive of Real Networks, whose online music store is a rival of Apple’s iTunes Store. “Steve is more focused on not cannibalizing iPod sales than on driving volume of phones. Those are not high-volume prices.”

It’s pretty easy to gloat about articles like these with the benefit of hindsight, but it was also pretty easy to know at the time that the iPhone was the future of cellphones. Everyone I know watched the presentation at the time realizing that they were watching the unveiling of the perfect convergence device that every other company on the planet would strive to copy. It was truly one of those rare keynotes where everyone was completely surprised.

Je Suis Charlie ⇥ newyorker.com

The bittersweet result of this week’s tragedy in Paris is the amount of moving and truly beautiful art that has come out of it. It doesn’t soften the viciousness and cowardice of the attacks, but it demonstrates a solidarity with those killed and those affected.

Back to Basics ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell:

The MacBook Air is now a comfortable, mainstream product that even power users can adopt as their primary system. (Until I bought my iMac, it was my primary machine at home and work for a couple of years.) That’s great, but it’s also a sign that feature creep has been a-creepin’.

Does Apple feel the current MacBook Airs are truly representative of the MacBook Air name? Has the MacBook Pro’s role as the go-to laptop for portable professionals been usurped by the Air?

Glad I’m not the only one who feels this way.

The Monopolist ⇥ asymco.com

Three posts on a common theme, but otherwise unrelated. First, Horace Dediu:

Great companies are “monopolists of customer trust” and are unaffected by alternatives. They are positioned on and nailing the job their products and services are hired for. The alternatives must not only duplicate the exact job (which they almost never do), but they must also overcome the switching costs.

Remember this when analyzing the impact of yet another competitor and considering the “Apple must fix/do X or else” assertions.

Ken Segall:

[Steve Jobs] believed that a company’s brand works like a bank account. When the company does good things, such as launch a hit product or a great campaign, it makes deposits in the brand bank. When a company experiences setbacks, like an embarrassing mouse or an overpriced computer, it’s making a withdrawal. When there’s a healthy balance in the brand bank, customers are more willing to ride out the tough times. With a low balance, they might be more tempted to cut and run.

Steve went on record many times about the importance of building a strong Apple brand. And he benefited from having a high balance in the brand bank many times. One of the most negative stories in recent years was the now-famous “Antennagate” controversy. When iPhone 4 was launched, Apple was battered by journalists and influential bloggers over what was perceived to be a flawed antenna design. Despite the heavily negative press and ridiculing by late-night TV hosts, Apple’s customers remained true. Now that episode is remembered only as an example of overreaction, with virtually no long-term impact.

Craig Hockenberry:

Apple is a manufacturing powerhouse: the scale of your company’s production line is an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately, software development is still a craft: one that takes time and effort to achieve the fit and finish your customers expect.

Apple would never ship a device that was missing a few screws. But that’s exactly what’s happening right now with your software products.

At CES, Plenty of Snake Oil to Go Around ⇥ fastcompany.com

Tyler Hayes, Fast Company:

From the outside looking in, the state of the music industry is tough to figure out. Streaming music was up 54% last year, but so were sales of the decades-old vinyl format. At the CES gadget extravaganza this week in Las Vegas, wireless products have been abundant—Google even announced a new wireless streaming initiative for connected speakers called Cast for Audio—but hardware makers also appear to be doubling down on high-end audio gear. The kind of equipment that’s typically meant for those with supersonic hearing, not average consumers.

Setting aside the woefully incorrect use of the word “supersonic” here, nobody has hearing good enough to notice the difference between a CD-quality file and whatever Pono is selling. Hell, most people can’t tell the difference between a mediocre quality MP3 and what’s on a CD. Hayes is just writing up the marketing package here.

If the trend in the music industry has been for people to stop paying for music, then the companies selling audio products are going to start targeting the outliers who still want to savor music that sounds like it just dripped from the musicians’ instruments. And if companies like Samsung, Sony, and Panasonic can make high-end audio equipment cool in the process, maybe more people will get serious about music.

I’m someone who still pays for music. I’m serious about music. This sort of stuff makes me feel like I’m getting ripped off, not like it’s “dripping from the musicians’ instruments”. Nobody gets serious about music by buying expensive audio gear. At that point, they’re not listening to the music — they’re just listening to the gear.

PonoPlayer Available Next Week; PonoMusic Store Live Now ⇥ pitchfork.com

My favourite dead horse is alive and well, so it seems. The PonoPlayer will be available next week for $400 — a steal when you compare it to Sony’s ludicrous $1,200 Walkman. But the PonoMusic Store is live now, so I thought I’d go take a look.

On the homepage, I noticed that they were featuring Foo Fighters’ “Sonic Highways”, which is one of the worst-mastered albums I’ve heard all year. Though it may be a reasonably high-quality 44.1 kHz, 24 bit version, I bet it still sounds just as brickwalled as the iTunes version. So I added “Something From Nothing” to my cart.

And that got me thinking: I wonder if one of the worst-mastered albums in history is on Pono. Surely I couldn’t find something that sounds as bad as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ “Californication” on an audiophile music store. But, much to my surprise, it’s there. I added this to my cart, too — the full album, because you can’t, for some reason, buy individual songs for this album.

Then I went to check out, and started filling in my billing information. And it was only at this point that I found out that PonoMusic is only available in the United States right now, which is odd, because Neil Young, one of the guys behind Pono, is Canadian.

I wasn’t able to find out first-hand whether the version of “Californication” on Pono uses the same awful-sounding master as every other version of it, including the vinyl. Happily, by the time I tried to buy the album, some others already did and shared their thoughts. Justin Denman:

Okay, I’m the guinea pig for you all. I purchased Californication. IT’S BRICKWALLED to the max. The 96kHz/24bit is useless, and I feel ripped off. It’s very frustrating, but hopefully I’ll save everyone else some money by sharing.

Gross.

“Let Us Pause to Honor the Disrupted” ⇥ nytimes.com

Leon Wieseltier, writing for the New York Times:

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind.

This is so good. Wieseltier, continued:

Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology.

A History of Apple News and Rumors During CES ⇥ macstories.net

It’s amazing how much of a presence Apple has at CES for having no presence at CES.

USB Type-C Hands-On ⇥ cnet.com

Key to that rumoured 12-inch MacBook Air is the USB “Type-C” connector. Dong Ngo, CNet:

To quickly recap, apart from the fact that with Type-C there’s no need to worry about which side of the cable to plug in (it works either side up), it also packs the USB 3.1 standard, which comes with a top speed of 10Gbps, twice the current speed of USB 3.0.

It also includes support for displays and much higher-wattage power, which means that someday you will be able to plug one cable into your laptop to charge it and connect it to your big, desktop display. But, while 10 Gbps is no slouch, it’s just half the speed of a Thunderbolt connection, which is 10 Gbps in both directions simultaneously, or 20 Gbps with Thunderbolt 2. That kind of bandwidth can be largely eaten up by using a high-resolution display¹ and a backup hard drive.

But USB Type-C has a couple of advantages over Thunderbolt. First, it’s reversible, like any good connector.² Second, it’s actually going to be adopted on a much more mainstream basis, and compatible peripherals should be less expensive and more plentiful.

The 12-Inch MacBook Air ⇥ 9to5mac.com

What a scoop for Mark Gurman — who else could it be? — at 9to5Mac:

Apple is preparing an all-new MacBook Air for 2015 with a radically new design that jettisons standards such as full-sized USB ports, MagSafe connectors, and SD card slots in favor of a markedly thinner and lighter body with a higher-resolution display.

If this scoop is true, it’s yet another example of Gurman’s incredibly high level of sources inside Apple. Impressive.

There’s one word conspicuously absent from Gurman’s reporting, though: “Retina”. He does mention a higher-resolution display and the post is tagged with “Retina Display”, but he doesn’t say either way whether this is the Retina MacBook Air.

It makes sense either way, too. Perhaps in favour of this being a non-Retina product, this part of Gurman’s report:

The upcoming 12-inch Air has the fewest amount of ports ever on an Apple computer, as can be seen in the rendition above. On the right side is a standard headphone jack and dual-microphones for input and noise-canceling. On the left side is solely the new USB Type-C port. Yes, Apple is currently planning to ditch standard USB ports, the SD Card slot, and even its Thunderbolt and MagSafe charging standards on this new notebook. We must note that Apple tests several designs of upcoming products, so Apple may choose to ultimately release a new Air that does include the legacy components, though there is very little space on the edges for them.

Why would Apple drop so many ports and connectors from the Air, especially something as useful and distinctively “Apple” as MagSafe? Power. Each port draws a little bit of power, so reducing the number of ports should reduce power consumption. So, too, should using Intel’s Broadwell chipset at a low clock speed, and removing the fans. A Retina display might be incompatible with this vision of low-power, impossibly-long-lasting computing.

This reminds me of the original MacBook Air, from 2008. It had just four ports: MagSafe, micro DVI, USB, and headphone. For comparison, the MacBook Pro of the time had at least seven ports, if you count the ExpressCard slot as one. Today’s MacBook Air has five ports on the 11-inch model, and adds an SD card reader on the 13-inch. Perhaps this is merely a way of realigning the Air with its original core premise.

In 2010, Apple promised that, one day, all notebooks would be like the Air. Now, the Air is the “default” MacBook, and it’s hard for a lot of people to see why they’d pay the extra money for a Retina MacBook Pro. Apple has almost never competed on price, but on actual feature differentiation. As their notebook lineup looks increasingly like a bunch of different MacBook Air models, maybe this is an opportunity for them to differentiate the lineup.

On the other hand, maybe this product is the culmination of a bunch of different rumours. Maybe this is the 12-inch Retina MacBook Air and the long-rumoured ARM-powered MacBook. Which makes it kind of like that rumoured “iPad Pro”, except this entire report clearly describes a MacBook, not an iPad.

Of course, this is all based on speculation and rumours. But it’s from Gurman, and he’s kind of a clairvoyant.

Under Fire ⇥ fastcompany.com

Harry McCrackenAustin Carr¹ wrote a huge story on the development and aftermath of Amazon’s Fire Phone for Fast Company, and it’s simultaneously scintillating and scathing:

[Jeff] Bezos didn’t want a me-too device, and the margins a low-cost phone could garner would be minimal, even if it did manage to stand out in an ocean of cheap devices. The only solution, some inside the organization argued, was to differentiate the hardware enough to justify a higher price point and hope to go after some of Apple’s profits. But Apple is a ferocious competitor as well, whose dominance in high-end products was made possible by decades of rigorous R&D, a world-class design team, and its unrivaled approach to hardware and software. The idea that Amazon, a neophyte hardware maker whose CEO has shown no special affinity for design, could successfully attack Apple might seem quixotic.

Even a word like “quixotic” might be an understatement for a company like Amazon trying to go after Apple’s high price point. Samsung was able to do it because they didn’t really have a household brand image pre-Galaxy.² You didn’t really think of Samsung; they were just a supplier. Samsung could be Brand X, for all it’s worth. So when they came along with a smartphone that looked kind of like an iPhone on carriers that didn’t offer the iPhone, that looked like a pretty good proposition, even at a similar high price point.

Amazon, on the other hand, does have a definite brand image: they’re the place you go to buy low-cost products. Apple is seen as an affordable luxury brand with exemplary taste and premium quality. And Jeff Bezos doesn’t exactly have great taste:

Bezos drove the team hard on one particular feature: Dynamic Perspective, the 3-D effects engine that is perhaps most representative of what went wrong with the Fire Phone. Dynamic Perspective presented the team with a challenge: Create a 3-D display that requires no glasses and is visible from multiple angles. The key would be facial recognition, which would allow the phone’s cameras to track a user’s gaze and adjust the 3-D effect accordingly. After a first set of leaders assigned to the project failed to deliver, their replacements went on a hiring spree. One team even set up a room that they essentially turned into a costume store, filling it with wigs, sunglasses, fake moustaches, and earrings that they donned for the cameras in order to improve facial recognition. “I want this feature,” Bezos said, telling the team he didn’t care how long it took or how much it cost. Eventually, a solution was discovered: Four cameras had to be mounted at the corners of the phone, each capable of identifying facial features, whether in total darkness or obscured by sunglasses. But adding that to the phone created a serious battery drain.

And team members simply could not imagine truly useful applications for Dynamic Perspective. As far as anyone could tell, Bezos was in search of the Fire Phone’s version of Siri, a signature feature that could make the device a blockbuster. But what was the point, they wondered, beyond some fun gaming interactions and flashy 3-D lock screens. “In meetings, all Jeff talked about was, ‘3-D, 3-D, 3-D!’ He had this childlike excitement about the feature and no one could understand why,” recalls a former engineering head who worked solely on Dynamic Perspective for years. “We poured surreal amounts of money into it, yet we all thought it had no value for the customer, which was the biggest irony. Whenever anyone asked why we were doing this, the answer was, ‘Because Jeff wants it.’ No one thought the feature justified the cost to the project. No one. Absolutely no one.”

Oh, how right they were.

Update: Corrected byline reference to Austin Carr per this tweet.

Must-Have Gadgets You Don’t Need Will Glimmer at CES ⇥ bloomberg.com

Side effects of going to CES may include constipation, diarrhea, fatigue, gas, heartburn, headache, drowsiness, lightheadedness, dizziness, sedation, shortness of breath, nausea, vomiting, and sweating.

Balancing the Functional High Ground ⇥ macstories.net

Federico Viticci, MacStories:

We’re in 2015, and things have changed. I tried to imagine the reaction to Craig Federighi pointing to a big iOS 8 slide boldly stating “No New Features”, and it wouldn’t be pleasant. I guess the mainstream media would be claiming that “Apple has lost its mojo”; developers would be upset for the lack of new functionalities and APIs to build new apps for. Six years after Snow Leopard, I don’t think “normal people” would respond well to a bug-fixes-only iOS release either.

Agreed entirely. Apple has, in two years, dramatically overhauled both iOS and OS X, and the pace at which they’ve moved really shows. Apple can’t take this year off, but they could ensure that some of the longstanding and critical bugs (WiFi connectivity in Yosemite, for instance) on both platforms are addressed while also releasing new features. It’s going to be a big year for them.

TapSense Attempts to Sour the Apple Watch ⇥ tapsense.com

Ash Kumar of TapSense:

Continuing its lead in wearables, TapSense, a leading mobile ad exchange, today announced the industry’s first programmatic ad platform for Apple Watch. The platform provides full suite of solutions for developers and brands to get started on the new Apple Watch platform including SDK for app developers and programmatic APIs for brands, agencies, and marketers.

Gross.

What’s really dumb is how this news is being spun by the usual suspects as “Apple Watch Will Deliver ‘Hyper-Local’ Ads On Your Wrist”, for example, when it is, in fact, a third party offering an platform by which some crappy apps will put ads on your Apple Watch, which was obviously and unfortunately going to happen. There will, of course, also be developers who respect their users.

The State of Panic, 2014 ⇥ panic.com

Not just any state of panic, but the state of Panic-with-a-capital-P. Sounds like another great year for them, and many more to come. I’m excited.

So Much for That “Year of Android” ⇥ phandroid.com

Yeah, yeah: it’s January 5, and they’ve got all year to sort this stuff out. Rob Jackson, Phandroid:

The Google Play Store is becoming an absolute joke, governed by contradicting laws that are enforced without logic, and policed anonymously and at random. Once heralded as the most open and developer friendly mobile platform on the planet, Google has given Android a huge black eye by sucker-punching loyal developers right in the face. Over and over and over.

Sounds familiar.