Month: September 2015

Execution Matters ⇥ newyorker.com

Joshua Topolsky has written an article for — of all publications — the New Yorker about Apple’s “Hey Siri” event. It’s an astute article that is, unfortunately, couched in a language that contrasts being first to introduce a feature with companies that copy that feature — namely, Apple. I think that does a great disservice to observations like this:

In the age of digital, execution is staggeringly important, and there isn’t a single company in existence that can pull off polish and simplicity like Apple. While other companies struggle just to get all of their devices and services talking to one another, Tim Cook and friends are worrying over the details that actually make consumers pay attention. The products don’t just work the way they should; they feel the way they should. Reducing friction, even a single click, can change the way a user perceives an entire product.

That’s a brilliant nutshell-sized description of Apple’s strategy: great products that work great together. But I’ve intentionally omitted that paragraph’s first sentence:

And that’s part of the reason why Apple’s “me too”s end up feeling like “me-first”s.

Once it’s defined within those parameters, Topolsky’s article starts feeling like a “me too”, doesn’t it? Haven’t you read this critique before? (The headline: “Apple: You’ve Seen It All Before, and Nothing Else Like It”.)

And, of course, Topolsky simply couldn’t resist the requisite quoting of Steve Jobs’ quip in the context of the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil:

(It’s also worth pointing out that, in 2010, Steve Jobs very publicly derided the idea of needing a stylus at all: “If you see a stylus, they blew it!”)

That’s lazy.

This article is a kind of meta critique of execution. Topolsky’s originality shines in his observation that execution is what counts, but it’s shrouded in the same kind of language that’s been used since the introduction of the original iPod, and probably before that. At least the iPad Pro has wireless and more space than a Nomad.

The Apple Pencil ⇥ nooctothorpe.com

Of all the depressingly predictable cynicism on Twitter regarding yesterday’s event — and there was a lot of that — the worst surrounded the Apple Pencil. It’s indicative of the limited inquiry of some, and the lack of contextual awareness that permeates much of the tech press. G. Keenan Schneider effectively rebukes the laziest of the arguments against the Pencil: the “Steve said” ones.

The 16 GB iPhone Creates a Bad User Experience ⇥ david-smith.org

David Smith:

The storage capacities of iPhones aren’t a side effect, they are a choice. I cannot begin to imagine the amount of discussion, research and thought that Apple has put into the capacities of their headline product. I’m sure bumping up the base model to 32GB would cost the company more and so by holding the line at 16GB for another year they will increase their profits. This near term benefit will surely help their balance sheet in their next earnings call but comes at the cost of the day-to-day experience of some of their customers.

In the end Apple has decided to continue offering a product that will almost inevitably fail their customer at some point, and potentially fail them at a moment of deep personal importance.

There were very few disappointments in yesterday’s event, but the continued existence of a 16 GB base model iPhone is definitely one.1

I’ve always assumed that the 16 GB model exists as the shit model that you don’t buy, but which makes spending another $100 for four times the space significantly more palatable. But that theory doesn’t entirely make sense. The data that Smith has shows that 43% of his iPhone 6 customers went ahead and bought 16 GB iPhones anyway.

Putting another 16 GB of storage space in the base model would undoubtably cost Apple a couple of dollars per phone2 and, at tens of millions of phones per quarter, cost them a not-inconsiderable amount in profit over the lifetime of the product, but the 16 GB iPhone is untenable in 2015. Sure, put that much storage in the free-on-contract model (this year, the 5S) but the most recent model is supposed to be the flagship, even in its base configuration.

  1. So is that damn camera bump. ↥︎

  2. Component pricing is a closely-guarded secret, and nobody outside of Apple knows how much they pay for their flash storage. I feel that this is a reasonable estimate based on current market trends and profit margins. ↥︎

Behind the Scenes of Today’s Apple Announcements ⇥ bloomberg.com

Apple was uncharacteristically open, relatively speaking, about today’s announcements. They gave an early peek at 3D Touch to Bloomberg reporter Josh Tyrangiel:

Everyone knows Apple is a design-first company, but the degree to which this is true has, if anything, been underappreciated. The relationship between the designers and the nondesign executives is a little like the relationship between American Pharoah and his trainer. One side is nominally in charge, but it’s conspicuously in service to the other. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, says that at most software companies the designers decide what they want and the engineers respond with what’s easy to build. “Every single feature becomes this unholy compromise,” says Federighi, who began his career at Apple and spent a decade at Ariba, a maker of financial management software, before returning in 2009. “With [3D Touch] it was only at the moment where we finally got a design experience that’s like, ‘Yes! This is what we want!’ that we [asked] how hard it’s going to be to make.”

Meanwhile, former Apple UI prototyper May-Li Khoe explained a little more on Twitter:

One of our first experiments for 3D touch was made with a stop animation of play-doh squishing. play < – > design.

And, finally, former Apple prototyper Linda Dong, also on Twitter, is very proud of the work she and her former team did on the Apple Pencil, which works with the iPad Pro:

Apple Pencil = the best stylus hands down. It was better than other styluses as a prototype.

“Hey Siri, Are You Feeling Stereotypical?”

Today’s Apple event was chock full of very exciting new products, but one thing was lacking: women presenters. After a full forty minutes in, not a single woman appeared onstage.

When a woman was finally shown onstage, it was in Adobe’s demo of some design software for the new iPad Pro. It was a photo of a model, and Eric Snowden of Adobe1 made her smile more. Gross. I don’t understand how this demo was approved, or how nobody spotted just how offensive this is.

Irene Walsh from 3D4Medical was next onstage and she was fantastic. You should really go check out her demo; it starts at about 41:45 into the keynote video.

To demo the Apple TV, Jen Folse took the stage. She’s part of the team that created the TV, though Eddy Cue didn’t announce her title. She was also fantastic. I highly recommend watching her demo, too.

But things took a bit of a dive back into gender normativity when Apple brought onstage Gilt CEO Michelle Peluso to demo her company’s app on the Apple TV. The “even he likes to shop” line — “he” being her husband — felt a little ’50s throwback, and not in the cool Leon Bridges kind of way.

To be clear: it’s great that Walsh, Folse, and Peluso got some stage time, and that the number of men on the stage only outnumbered the women by a factor of 4:1 or so this time, instead of ∞:0. But my hope is that it gets to a nice 1:1 split, and that women don’t have to call attention to themselves for being women. They should be accepted just the same as the men on stage.

Update: Corrected spelling of Jen Folse’s name.

  1. As John Moltz quipped, “I’ll bet this guy has a great time at the TSA line.” ↥︎

John Gruber’s Prelude to Tomorrow’s “Hey Siri” Event ⇥ daringfireball.net

Gruber is going against the grain and betting on two events, as with the past few years:

iPhones, Apple Watch, new Apple TV this week. That’s a full event, but not a crowded event. Then we all come back in mid-October for a second event, almost certainly at a smaller venue, where Apple reveals the new iPad lineup, new Mac hardware (like, say, the retina version of the 21-inch iMac) and Craig Federighi gets on stage to demonstrate all the new features in El Capitan. If “new iPads and Macs” were worth their own October event last year, why not again this year, when Apple is purportedly set to announce the iPad Pro?

This is all going to be revealed in twelve hours, so taking a bet at this time is a little silly, but roll with me here. There’s a lot to talk about with the Apple TV and it’s a big upgrade, so it’s probably going to be the last item on the agenda (aside from the special musical guest), and will probably consume half an hour or so of stage time. The iPhone will certainly see a fair amount of time as well — perhaps 30-or-so minutes as well, right at the top of the event.

That leaves 30-40 minutes in the middle. iOS 9 probably doesn’t need too much time to demo, mostly because the demo-friendly features are probably limited to Proactive and Spotlight, Notes, News, and the iPad enhancements. There’s nothing very demo-friendly in watchOS 2, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they show a few screenshots and move along. Apple Watch enhancements may merely garner a mention, too; the rumours say that there will likely be some new Sport Band colours and perhaps shades of aluminum Sport models to match all of the iPhone case colours. All of this can’t take much more than 10-15 minutes, leaving a reasonable chunk of time to talk about the iPad Pro.1 There’s probably enough crossover that it doesn’t require a large amount of explanation — it’s an iPad, but bigger and more capable — so there’s probably enough time in there to talk about side-by-side apps, hardware, and how it will make your life better.

This would make for a large event, sure, but not one that’s too stuffed. Gruber doesn’t have any sources for his two events theory, while John Paczowski, Mark Gurman, and Federico Viticci all say that a new iPad will be announced tomorrow. I’m going with the grain.

So what about El Capitan, the forthcoming 4K iMac, and any other new Mac hardware or software Apple wants to announce? My hope is that there’s enough left for a very significant October event. In effect, I’d love if the rumour mill has been so busy trying to keep up with all of the “Hey Siri” event leaks that some crazy new Mac hardware or software has slipped under the radar. My hunch, though, is that both El Cap and the iMac will be launched without an event. Neither has enough public mindshare to warrant much more than a press release and an update to the Apple.com homepage hero image.

  1. Mark Gurman’s sources have said that a new iPad Air won’t be released this autumn. I bet the new iPad Mini will get a mention at the event, though. ↥︎

GigaOm’s Terrible Reporting of the New AdBlock Plus Browser ⇥ gigaom.com

Nathaniel Mott, in a GigaOm piece titled “AdBlock Plus Comes to iOS Ahead of Apple’s Ad-Blocking Tools”:

The company behind AdBlock Plus, Eyeo, has been trying to make its way into the smartphone market for a while. It has visited Android smartphones a few times over the last several years, and now it’s debuted on the iPhone just a day before Apple is expected to make ad-blocking a part of its mobile web browser.

This is bad reporting for a mainstream publication, but inexcusable for a tech-centric publication like GigaOm.

iOS 9 does not include an ad blocker. Content blockers — some of which will be ad blockers, while others will block other things that junk up the web, such as comment sections — will be available from third-party developers in the App Store. Users must download and activate them manually.

Furthermore, iOS 9 is probably not going to be released tomorrow. If Apple holds true to their year-to-year pattern, as they are wont to do, it will be released on September 16 at 10:00 AM Pacific. At least, that’s what I’m counting on — big reviews take time.

Then there’s this:

…large companies like Microsoft, Taboola, and Google have all paid Eyeo to have their advertisements included on the “whitelist,” effectively making AdBlock Plus an extortion tool.

That explains some of Eyeo’s discomfort about Apple’s new ad-blocking tools, as shown by its attempts to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about them. If people use Safari extensions instead of AdBlock Plus’ new dedicated browser, Eyeo can’t convince large companies to pay to have their ads on the whitelist.

Why not? The format for content blockers in Safari is ridiculously easy to understand. All Eyeo needs to do is port their list over to Apple’s format, and use ignore-previous-rules instead of block to show ads from the providers they’ve extorted.

The Guardian article that’s linked in that quote, by the way, is equally stupid:

Apple has not said whether its content blocking system will be used for preventing adverts within browsers. The company runs an advertising service called iAds within applications that run on iPhones and iPads and is unlikely to adopt a system that could damage its own revenue stream.

iAds run in apps. Content blockers apply only to Safari and Safari View Controllers within apps. Why is this so difficult for people to understand?

iMessage Encryption Faces Its First Known Legal Test ⇥ nytimes.com

Matt Apuzzo, et al., New York Times:

In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over, in real time, text messages between suspects using iPhones.

Apple’s response: Its iMessage system was encrypted and the company could not comply.

Good news, right? The government wanted a wiretap on iMessages, Apple said that they were encrypted, and the government backed off. Is it inconvenient for investigators that they can’t just wiretap iMessages any time they want? Sure, but most people using iMessage aren’t suspects in a crime. Investigators should not have indiscriminate power.

Here’s the rub, though:

With Apple, the encryption and decryption are done by the phones at either end of the conversation; Apple does not keep copies of the message unless one of the users loads it into iCloud, where it is not encrypted. (In the drug and gun investigation this summer, Apple eventually turned over some stored iCloud messages. While they were not the real-time texts the government most wanted, officials said they saw it as a sign of cooperation.)

While the contents of an iPhone are encrypted on the device if you set a passcode, and the contents of iMessages and some other communications are encrypted in transit, there’s no option to create an encrypted iCloud backup see update below. To make matters worse, when setting up an iPhone, iCloud backups are turned on by default; I’d wager that most people probably leave it switched on because of the power of the default choice.

I don’t see a reason why Apple can’t offer a password-protected, encrypted iCloud backup. That seems like a no-brainer to me. In the interim, you can disable backing up to iCloud in Settings and use iTunes instead, which offers an encrypted backup option. It’s what I use, though you should be aware of its restrictions.

Update: Tze-Ho Tan pointed me to this Apple support document, which states quite clearly that iCloud “always encrypts your backups”. I’m not sure how else one would “load” messages into iCloud other than a backup, and I don’t know how anyone would do that without encryption. I’ve reached out to the reporters responsible for the Times piece.

Update: After further investigation, it appears that “encryption” is being used in two different ways by Apple when referring to device backups. From what I understand, iTunes backups and iCloud backups are both encrypted, but in different ways. iTunes backups are protected by a password, making all contents unreadable to those who do not know the password; only the user, presumably, knows that password. They’re also stored locally, which means that this level of encryption is sufficient: law enforcement would need a warrant to seize the equipment, and another to induce a user to give up the password.

By contrast, iCloud backups are encrypted on Apple’s end in a way that they can decrypt. In over-simplified terms, they know the password. So, your iMessages are not stored in clear text, but nor are they encrypted in a way that is impossible to reverse.

Upgrading Your iPhone With a Paired Apple Watch ⇥ thesweetsetup.com

I have a feeling many of you, as I, will soon be needing this guide from Bradley Chambers:

According to this Apple support document, Apple Watch triggers a current backup when you unpair it from your iPhone. The iPhone has to be in range in order for the backup to take place, though. I didn’t read this before I started the process, so I simply kept Apple Watch paired to the old phone, but then tried to pair to the new iPhone. When I launched the Watch app on the new iPhone, I was told that I needed to wipe my existing Apple Watch. You can do this by going to Settings → General on Apple Watch. When you back up your iPhone to iCloud and/or iTunes, your backup includes your Apple Watch data.

This is a little confusing to me. From what I can gather, a current backup of your Apple Watch exists on your iPhone only when you un-pair the two within range, and the backup of your iPhone in iCloud or iTunes will have a copy of this Watch backup. The Apple support document says much the same:

When you unpair your Apple Watch from your iPhone, your iPhone automatically creates a backup of your Apple Watch. Unpairing will erase all data from your Apple Watch. If your Apple Watch is unpaired while out of range of your iPhone, the backup won’t be created.

I have a feeling that I’ll be trading in my 5S for a 6S shortly, which means that I will first have to un-pair my Apple Watch within range, then create a new, full backup of my 5S. Only then should I take my current phone in to my local Apple Store for the upgrade credit. I should then take my new iPhone home, set it up from the 5S backup, and then re-pair my Watch, thereby restoring its connection to my new phone.

I’m still a little unclear as to how Chambers was able to swap his iPhone and have a backup of his Watch data without doing the un-pair/re-pair dance. It sounds like his iPhone backup happened to have a recent Watch backup, too, but I’m not sure how that’s the case if he didn’t un-pair it. I have asked him, and will update if I hear back.

Update: Chambers has no idea either how he had a recent Apple Watch backup. I’m not gambling on that stroke of luck; I intend on following the steps above.

SiriScript ⇥ bitsplitting.org

Daniel Jalkut:

I realize that when I am faced with a problem on iOS or watchOS, for which I wish there were an automated, “power user” mechanism to simplify it, I reach for Siri and hope for the best.

In this respect Siri fills the gap that is left by the omission of an automating service such as AppleScript.

In different versions of OS X, Apple has introduced ways of bringing “power user”-style automation to regular users. AppleScript is a pretty simplified language, but it’s too much for most people. Automator is very visual, but most people don’t know it exists and wouldn’t necessarily think of the “right” order in which to place the blocks. Even something like the multi-file renaming introduced in Yosemite isn’t entirely intuitive. Something like Siri on OS X could radically simplify everything from the most basic commands to much, much more complex tasks.

Update: Clarified a few sentences, demonstrating why I should not write anything while I’m still waking up.

Face It ⇥ verynicewebsite.net

John Moltz:

The reason most analog watches were round is not because round watches are better or because square watches can’t be stylish. It’s simply because the motion of the hands describes a circle. That’s all the space that was ever needed for the device to fulfill its most basic function. Because that shape is so tightly suited to that particular function, it’s decidedly at odds with adding functionality to it. Thus we have the date being blocked by the hands once every hour.

The Ad Industry Plots Their Revenge ⇥ adage.com

Content blockers are coming in iOS 9, which is frankly a blessing these days. After seeing the improvements with the one I’m using — Crystal — I’ve started to consider how ad exchanges will respond. But, while Rene Ritchie has similar thoughts and Don Searls is optimistic, advertisers are less welcoming. Tim Peterson, AdAge:

“I advocated for the top 100 websites to, beginning on the same day, not let anybody with ad blockers turned on [to view their content],” said [Xaxis Chairman David] Moore. He said that the other IAB members in attendance considered it “a good idea but the possibility of pulling it off slim.”

(Why, yes, Xaxis is an adtech provider. Good guess, reader.)

The ad blockers “are interfering with websites’ ability to display all the pixels that are part of that website, arguably there’s some sort of law that prohibits that,” Mr. Moore said. “I’m not by any means a lawyer, but there is work being done to explore whether in fact that may be the case.”

Technically, ads delivered via other websites are not part of that website. When I visit, say, the New York Post’s site — not that I do — I expect to see content from the Post, not all this crap.

Anyway, if you know what addresses Xaxis uses to serve their ads, feel free to point them to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file. You’re not blocking ads; you’re just configuring your DNS the way you like it. Nothing Mr. Moore can do about that.

On NetNewsWire for iPhone ⇥ buildingtwenty.net

Michael Anderson is lukewarm on the iPhone version of NetNewsWire. He raises a lot of good points, but one in particular stood out to me:

The iOS 8 share sheet isn’t integrated so you’re limited as to which services you can share to.

You can, in fact, bring up the system sharing sheet from the custom sheet by tapping the AirDrop icon. This isn’t to say Anderson is wrong; rather, it’s to point out how dated this app’s philosophy is.

We’re on the cusp of the launch of iOS 9, and NetNewsWire still has a custom share sheet. Why? All of the functions that are provided by the custom one are either provided by the system, or things I don’t use (it has App.net integration). Add to that a lack of its own extension and no background refresh, and it seems clear that this app began development pre-iOS 8.

I really like the team at Black Pixel, but NetNewsWire has a very specific audience, and I don’t think this new version really appeals to them on either iOS or the Mac. In that sense, it comes across as confused. Both are adequate RSS readers, but I don’t think the word “adequate” is how NetNewsWire has ever been described.

NetNewsWire “Lite” ⇥ mjtsai.com

Michael Tsai isn’t a massive fan of the new NetNewsWire for Mac:

It still has the “lite” feature set, nothing like my beloved NetNewsWire 3. There are no smart folders. There’s no meaningful AppleScript support. It doesn’t support the system share menu.

I’ve only had the chance to play around with the iPhone version, but it does feel awfully light. That’s not to discredit what I’m sure is a significant modernization of the Mac app underneath and, presumably, code compatibility with the iPhone app, but I can’t help but ache for more. From my iPhone, I can SSH into my web server and write Python scripts, but my super niche version of a super niche category of products is similar to its competitors? I’d pay $10 for a NetNewsWire “Pro” for my iPhone; I’d use the hell out of that.

NetNewsWire Returns ⇥ sixcolors.com

Remember NetNewsWire? Remember RSS? You’ve probably got to be a little old and grizzly to remember either of these things, but NetNewsWire is, was, and is again an RSS reader for the Mac. This fourth version — released a mere three years after the most recent stable build — brings with it all the trimmings of a modern application for the Mac, with cloud syncing support (free!) and an iPhone app counterpart.

This comes at a pretty good time for me. I’ve recently been looking for a good RSS reader on my iPhone, and NetNewsWire seems to fit the bill. It feels a little outdated in some ways — there’s no extension to add a site from Safari, for instance, no site search, and the app isn’t even universal — but it’s perfectly adequate. I shall be trying it for a while.

The Mac app is adequate as well, but almost comically outdated. The screenshots on their website are over a year old. I’m sure they’ve worked hard for the past year to bring the syncing service up to suff and so on, but it’s still a bit of a time warp.

But who cares? News is hard to keep up with, RSS is a great solution, and NetNewsWire seems to fit the bill. NetNewsWire is about $4 for iPhone, and $10 for OS X — if you’d like to buy either app and support this site a little at the same time, you can buy them through those affiliate links.

Verizzzzz… ⇥ verizon.com

This isn’t bad design. This barely qualifies as “designed”. This is the absence of care. This is resignation. This is Verizon.

It’s perfect.