Month: May 2015

Another Rule of Thumb for “Getting” Apple ⇥ cnet.com

In yesterday’s commentary on Ken Segall’s article about understanding Apple, I noted that…

Apple’s success is defined by patience. The Watch is already an incredible product and it’s just a 1.0, with plenty of low-hanging fruit ready for picking. Apple Pay is way better than any of its competitors, primarily because Apple waited until they locked down major banks and credit card providers and had a brilliant interaction model.

The first rule of understanding Apple: patience, patience, patience.

The second rule? When faced by an obstacle so large that most of their competitors would back down, Apple takes it on head-first. Yesterday’s post about their substantially increased R&D spend is evidence of this, but naysayers’ attitudes have persisted for a long time. Remember the “MacBook Brick” rumours from many years ago?

Apparently, Apple has created a brand-new process to sculpt casings for products out of aircraft-grade aluminum, using a system that carves the pieces out of a single block of metal using “3D lasers” and water-jet cutting. The new technique will supposedly allow for seamless components which require no bending or folding, won’t use screws to join together, are ultra-light but also “super strong,” and will enable the company to rapidly prototype and produce new designs.

Industrial designers were skeptical. Adam Richardson of Frog Design thought this process was unlikely as described:

On a large product like a laptop this would typically result in a massive amount of waste (so kiss your green credentials goodbye). And the notion that this is somehow cheaper than stamping thin sheets or molding plastic is completely wrong – it’s much more expensive.

[…]

But given the complexity of the components that need to get tightly mounted inside a laptop casing, and the number of ports and so on that need to be exposed to the outside, it’s unlikely that it will literally be a hollowed out block of aluminum.

Friends of Cult of Mac’s Pete Mortensen thought it was impossible “in this lifetime”:

I’ve been talking with other industrial designers about this issue, and they all agree that the reasoning behind the current Brick rumor doesn’t add up. One friend of mine guessed it would add up to $50 in manufacturing costs and might not be any stronger or lighter than more traditional manufacturing approaches.

Does Apple have a game-changing laptop in the wings that will reinvent the MacBook and MacBook Pro design language? For their sake, they’d better. Will it be milled from a single block of aluminum? Not in this lifetime.

As it turned out, the rumours were almost entirely accurate. The only part of the case of any unibody MacBook that is held on with screws is the bottom panel. But Apple did, indeed, invest millions of dollars in state-of-the-art equipment and manufacturing techniques that have radically changed the limits of what they can do with their notebooks from a hardware perspective. There’s no way the new MacBook would exist in anything like its current form factor if the case relied upon a pre-unibody structure.

Rule number two: Apple measures their return on investment in years, not months.

Something’s Cooking ⇥ aboveavalon.com

Neil Cybart:

While pretty straight-forward, R&D as a percent of revenue can be misleading, making it difficult to comprehend how much money is being funneled into R&D. A more relevant and informative way to analyze Apples R&D spend is to look at the actual dollar increase from year to year. This method is more sensible because Apple has a functional organizational structure with a culture based on placing few, but extremely large, product bets. There is little evidence to suggest that Apple has altered the way it approaches new product development and R&D expenditures. In the past, the bulk of Apples R&D program has been focused on specific projects and goals. This stands at contrast with a strategy of setting up a number of R&D labs with no clear directive other than to find future products. If Apple is spending R&D, it is a good bet they have a specific goal in mind for those dollars.

Cybart’s third chart shows just how significant this R&D spending bump is.

An iPad Campaign for Normals ⇥ macstories.net

Remember Apple’s previous campaign — “Your Verse” — that showed how you could use the iPad inside a wind turbine, or to rescue people lost at sea? Well what if you have a comparatively mundane life, like most people? Federico Viticci of MacStories on the new “Everything Changes” campaign:

Apple’s focus is on ordinary situations: traveling and using Maps and FaceTime for directions and staying in touch with others; letting kids learn through educational apps and games from the App Store; managing personal tasks with OmniFocus and Todoist or creating a promotional poster directly on an iPad.

It’s hard to relate how some people use the iPad with how you can use it, unless you see it in an average, normal, everyday context.

As Viticci notes, the timing is curious. You know how iPad sales are down? These ads can’t hurt awareness, but “iPad” is pretty much a byword for “tablet”, at least for most people that I talk to. It isn’t that people haven’t heard of the iPad, but that many people haven’t spent significant time with one to know how it fits into their lives. These ads do a way better job of showing how other normal people use it.

Leapfrog ⇥ kensegall.com

Ken Segall:

Now we know there was a ton of work going on at Apple during The Period Of Great Whining. Possibly more than at any time in Apple’s history. Now we have new iPhones, Apple Pay and Apple Watch.

Plus a complete rework of iOS and a refresh of OS X.

Segall:

To me, this just says that Apple is doing a very good job of being Apple. Its mission is to create products that people can fall in love with. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a timetable for such things.

Apple’s success is defined by patience. The Watch is already an incredible product and it’s just a 1.0, with plenty of low-hanging fruit ready for picking. Apple Pay is way better than any of its competitors, primarily because Apple waited until they locked down major banks and credit card providers and had a brilliant interaction model.

When there is pressure for Apple to be impatient — both internally and externally — is when things go awry. Take the aforementioned OS X and iOS, both of which were announced with grand vision and arrived a little early, by expected quality standards. Neither is unusable (though OS X sometimes comes close) but both feel rushed and rough around the edges. They’re getting better, and there’s plenty of fruit left, but we need to be patient. And the market just doesn’t like that.

Clusterfuck (4) (5) (8) ⇥ furbo.org

Craig Hockenberry:

A network process using 100% of the CPU, WiFi disconnecting at random times, and names, names (1), names (2), names (4). All caused by a crappy piece of software called discoveryd.

[…]

Ironically, these issues are most likely to affect Apple’s best customers. The more devices you have, and the longer you have them, the more likely you are to get an unstable network. The only advice I can offer is to restart your entire network.

C:\ONGRTLNS.OSX

Marco Arment:

Yosemite is now 6 months old, these bugs still aren’t fixed, and it feels like they probably won’t be fixed anytime soon. Yosemite is probably in minimal-maintenance mode as primary resources have likely moved on to headlining features for 10.11.

I haven’t had any networking issues since 10.10.3, and I know that update fixed WiFi bugs for a lot of people that I know. But this is still happening for an alarming number of people. In an era where Apple is rapidly pushing for a cable-free experience, this is, frankly, unacceptable. Apple sells one remaining notebook model with an Ethernet port, and they’re not even offering an adaptor for the newest MacBook.

Apple was one of the first companies to ship a WiFi product to average consumers. This stuff should be old hat for them.

Apple Reportedly Pressuring Labels to Discontinue Free Streaming Tiers with Spotify and YouTube ⇥ theverge.com

Micah Singleton, the Verge:

Apple has been using its considerable power in the music industry to stop the music labels from renewing Spotify’s license to stream music through its free tier. Spotify currently has 60 million listeners, but only 15 million of them are paid users. Getting the music labels to kill the freemium tiers from Spotify and others could put Apple in prime position to grab a large swath of new users when it launches its own streaming service, which is widely expected to feature a considerable amount of exclusive content. “All the way up to Tim Cook, these guys are cutthroat,” one music industry source said.

Sources also indicated that Apple offered to pay YouTube’s music licensing fee to Universal Music Group if the label stopped allowing its songs on YouTube. Apple is seemingly trying to clear a path before its streaming service launches, which is expected to debut at WWDC in June. If Apple convinces the labels to stop licensing freemium services from Spotify and YouTube, it could take out a significant portion of business from its two largest music competitors.

If this is true, it’s bullying, plain and simple. Apple should offer a streaming service that can compete on its own merits, and shouldn’t need to resort to tactics like these to be able to succeed. It’s their own fault they’re a late entry in the streaming game.

The New Droplr ⇥ droplr.com

Droplr fills a weird but necessary niche for me: it is my preferred way to host smallish files that I want to share with a few or a lot of people. Uploading a file via FTP is a pain in the ass a lot of the time, even with Transmit on both OS X and iOS. iMessage is great for sending files to one or a few people, but you can’t use it as a host. Dropbox is great for collaborating with a lot of people, but if I just want to hotlink an image for, say, this site, it’s kind of overkill. Also, the latter two will retain files on my computer, instead of just putting a single copy in the mysterious cloud.

Droplr fixes that for me. It’s a great way for me to host small screenshots for this site and for Twitter, because it doesn’t compress images. It’s also a fantastic way to send people design comps or links for review, and it has a hit counter, so you can make sure they saw it (or, at least, that’s what I use it for).

So what’s new? They’ve got a sweet new identity and brand new apps across the board, including for iOS. I’ve been using it for the past few months and it’s fabulous. It has a brand new design and a Share action, just as you’d expect. It’s also clever: it has a screenshot-specific upload, so instead of spelunking through your entire photo library, you can just look at screenshots. Smart.

The new identity and hosting plans are live now, and I think the new iOS app will be out later today, with the new Mac app (also wonderful) following later this week.

Cupertino, Start Your Photocopiers ⇥ onefoottsunami.com

Microsoft is apparently the first major company to ship an operating system that supports the middle finger emoji. Despite their history of thinking of the children, I think the Tim Cook Apple might be willing to add it to their OSes as well.

Let me set the scene for you: it’s June 8, at the WWDC 2015 kickoff keynote. Tim Cook is back onstage after a tag team of Federighi and Schiller introducing iOS 9, OS X 10.11, and a new MacBook Pro.

“Did you like everything?” Tim asks, rhetorically. The crowd hollers; a faint voice from the back shouts “we love you Tim!” He grins.

“Well, we have just one more thing to show you.”

Tim presses the “next slide” button on his clicker. Up pops a thirty-foot-tall middle finger emoji. The crowd gasps, then bursts into rapturous applause.

“And it’s in iOS and OS X this fall, just in time to show your friends how you feel about them not upgrading to the new iPhone.” Tim presses the “next slide” button one more time, advancing to a white Apple logo with the middle finger superimposed. “Thank you everyone. We hope you have a fantastic WWDC.”

Layers Conference ⇥ bringyourlayers.com

I can’t make it to San Francisco for WWDC, but if you’re going to be in town, you should definitely go to Layers, from Jessie Char and Elaine Pow. Just look at the lineup, and their rad ticket pricing policy:

If you’re a woman by birth or identity, use the code #ragegap to receive a Layers pass for 77 cents on the dollar.

Ever since WWDC tickets have been delivered Willy Wonka style, there have been a few great conferences that have sprung up to accommodate the overflow. If Layers’ designer focus isn’t so much your speed, check out AltConf as well. I wish I could go to Layers, though — it looks absolutely incredible.

Us ⇥ verynicewebsite.net

John Moltz:

I’m fascinated with two moments in the middle of the “Us” Watch ad that show people in the midst of some kind of relationship problems. They’re surprisingly true-to-life and make the ad so much more poignant.

These kinds of quiet just-show-the-features ads are some of the best that Apple has ever done; arguably, they’re some of the best advertising in the world right now. They show simple vignettes that most of us have experienced, showing how the product works for us, but doesn’t make or break the scene. It’s just there, quietly.

Neven Mrgan’s First Week Without an Apple Watch ⇥ mrgan.tumblr.com

Neven Mrgan did not receive his Apple Watch on April 24. In fact, he hasn’t received it at all yet, so he’s taken the time to carefully review a week spent without one:

One bit of bad news: the most frustrating part of not using an Apple Watch has been the very noticeable delay when performing some common actions. Glances, for instance, don’t respond for four to six weeks after ordering.

Well said, Neven.

Expansive Surveillance Reform Takes Backseat to Politics ⇥ thehill.com

The Hill’s Julian Hattem has terrible news, everybody!

The amendment from Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) would block the spy agency from using powers under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to collect Americans’ Internet communications without a warrant. The NSA has relied on the powers of Section 702 to conduct its “PRISM” and “Upstream” collection programs, which gather data from major Web companies such as Facebook and Google, as well as to tap into the networks that make up the backbone of the Internet.

The amendment would have also prevented the government from forcing tech companies to include “backdoors” into their devices, so that the government could access people’s information.

“Would have”? What happened?

As lawmakers stare down the barrel of a deadline to renew or reform the Patriot Act, they have all but assured that more expansive reforms to U.S. intelligence powers won’t be included.

Uh, why? Aren’t you all in favour of this?

The move to drop the fix was all the more frustrating, supporters of the amendment said, because Congress overwhelmingly voted 293-123 to add similar language to a defense spending bill last year.

Okay, not all, but most of you are decidedly for this. Was it the substance of the reforms?

It’s not because of the substance of the reforms — which practically all members of the House Judiciary Committee said they support on Thursday — but…

Oh okay. But?

…because they would derail a carefully calibrated deal and are opposed by GOP leaders in the House and Senate.

Surprise, surprise.

Molly Watt’s Experience With the Apple Watch ⇥ mollywatt.com

Molly Watt has Usher Syndrome; she’s deafblind. I couldn’t imagine being in her shoes, trying to use technology the way she must, but the way she’s documented her experiences put a smile on my face:

So far for me the most useful App on the Apple Watch is Maps – on my iPhone I can plan my journey from one destination to another, for me it will be on foot with Unis my guidedog.

This is where Haptics really come into its own – I can be directed without hearing or sight, but by a series of taps via the watch onto my wrist – 12 taps means turn right at the junction or 3 pairs of 2 taps means turn left, I’m still experimenting with this but so far very impressed – usher syndrome accessible!

I’m fortunate enough to have my full vision and hearing, so I tend to think of interfaces from that perspective. Watt’s post — indeed, all her posts — are a welcome reminder that there are those who experience technology completely differently.