Month: January 2017

Apple’s Statement on Consumer Reports’ MacBook Pro Battery Tests ⇥ loopinsight.com

Apple PR, in a statement provided to news outlets:

We learned that when testing battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache. This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage. Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab.

The statement goes on a little longer, but the nutshell version comprises these three sentences. And I have issues with all of them.

Calling the Disable Caches setting “hidden” seems, at best, misleading. While it’s true that a user has to switch on the Develop menu in Safari’s preferences to expose this setting, that’s all done through Safari’s GUI. A “hidden” setting would be one that requires a Terminal command, wouldn’t it?

At any rate, arguably no battery test can truly reflect “real-world usage”, since all tests are — by definition — simulations of some kind of usage. Someone browsing the same three or four websites all day long with little else running would likely get very good battery life, while a user editing RAW photos that are synced to iCloud Photo Library would see pretty poor life. That’s just how it works. As the product becomes more targeted towards power users, the gap between the extremes of battery life will only get wider — you can bet that the number of users running Final Cut on a 12-inch MacBook is very, very low.

Consumer Reports’ browser-based battery test is, as Apple says, inconsistent with typical web browser usage. Most users will leave their cache on. But they’ll also probably browse more than ten web pages repeatedly, and might have iTunes, Messages, a couple of Finder windows, and Mail all running in the background.

We could argue about the validity of Consumer Reports’ test all day long. The third sentence in the excerpt I quoted above is the part where Apple admits that there is a flaw, but it seems pained and couched. Furthermore, it’s hard to see how a bug like this, when combined with a disabled cache, could lead to Consumer Reports seeing some test results with less than half that of Apple’s estimates, while other results were nearly double what Apple says. That’s a massive chasm, and I haven’t seen any MacBook Pro owner claiming to get battery life at the upper end of that spectrum.

The Post-Acquisition Yahoo IP Holding Company Will Be Called ‘Altaba’ ⇥ theguardian.com

Olivia Solon of the Guardian:

Verizon agreed to buy Yahoo’s search engine and web portal for $4.83bn back in July. However, Yahoo’s shareholders held onto the company’s lucrative investments – including a 36% stake in Yahoo Japan and a 16% stake in Alibaba – and patent portfolio. This remaining entity has no product and no staff members.

According to an SEC filing released today, that entity will, provided the Verizon deal goes through, be know as Altaba and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, along with five other board members, will resign from its board.

Use caution when consuming Altaba. Frequent use of Altaba may lead to headaches, back pain, and incontinence. Altaba is not recommended for pregnant or nursing women, children, or those over the age of sixty.

Altaba is the Tronc of 2017.

The Case for Transparency at Twitter ⇥ buzzfeed.com

Charlie Warzel, Buzzfeed:

In the span of a few days [Martin Shkreli] 1) direct-messaged [journalist Lauren] Duca to invite her to be his date at the inauguration, 2) changed his Twitter bio to read “i have a small crush on @laurenduca (hope she doesn’t find out),” 3) created a collage of images of Duca as his Twitter header, 4) changed his profile picture to a doctored image of Duca and her husband, where Shkreli’s face is photoshopped over Duca’s husband’s. Duca, who has over 130,000 Twitter followers, posted Shkreli’s bio and images around 11 a.m. Sunday. They went viral instantly and Shkreli was banned in just over two hours. “The Twitter Rules prohibit targeted harassment, and we will take action on accounts violating those policies,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

To Twitter’s credit, the company responded quickly to Duca’s plea and the subsequent tweets about Shkreli’s behavior. But Twitter’s vague, one-sentence justification for the suspension — the result of its long-stated policy not to comment on individual accounts for the privacy of its users — highlights a broader concern for the company in 2017: Twitter, despite its attempts to police its platform, appears unwilling to engage in the necessary transparency surrounding the harassment of its users.

The entirety of this story — Shkreli’s harassment in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands, Twitter’s response, and the ongoing abuse targeted towards Duca from Shkreli’s followers — is symptomatic of far deeper and more egregious concerns in the way we approach harassment in a primarily written form.

When I was young, I — like many of you, I’m sure — was taught that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. I’m sure the sentiment behind this is earnest, but reality shows that it is complete bullshit. The tweets and messages directed towards Duca aren’t mere words; they’re a call to action to a wide audience. The laws against online harassment are inconsistent state-to-state, and federal laws require a high level of evidence which, due to the way tweets and emails can be interpreted,1 isn’t always easy to prove.

Even if that’s resolved, the intent behind this abuse won’t go away. There’s a deeper cultural problem in the way that threats against women and people of colour, in particular, are perceived. The only way to make progress here is to listen to, and empathize with, those most affected.

  1. Frequently by a white, male prosecutor. ↥︎

‘The Best 1.0 in Tech History’ ⇥ internethistorypodcast.com

Marco Arment:

Not only was it truly mind-blowing at the time, but in retrospect, so much of modern computing was invented for that first iPhone phone and revealed to the world for the first time in that hour. Just watch the software demos: most modern UI mechanics and behaviors, large and small, began that day.

Brian McCullough:

With ten years of perspective, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the iPhone is the fact that, for all its retrospective imperfections, the original model was in fact so conceptually perfect, right out of the gate. Automobiles had to evolve for almost 40 years until they settled into the standard configuration we are familiar with today. On their first attempt, the team at Apple managed to stumble upon the perfect form factor, the perfect incarnation of the modern smartphone. Smartphones had existed for several years previous to the iPhone, but the standard form of the smartphone as we know it today — physical keyboard-less, a single slab of screen, a “black mirror” that is both a reflection of, and a conduit for, all of our hopes and desires — they nailed it on the first try. And that’s quite remarkable. Whatever you may think about the subsequent lawsuits and charges of copycat-ing, there’s a very good reason why everyone in the industry moved toward the paradigm the iPhone pioneered.

Plenty of commentators are expressing similar sentiments today. The iPhone really is the bridge into the post-PC world.

Man Who Didn’t Invent Email Sues Techdirt for Saying So ⇥ nymag.com

Brian Feldman, New York magazine:

Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who claims to have invented email — and who sued now-defunct gossip blog Gawker for saying he didn’t — announced this morning that he’s filed a new lawsuit yesterday against the website Techdirt. Ayyadurai is seeking $15 million in damages — and is represented by Charles Harder, the lawyer who represented him and Hulk Hogan in their suits against Gawker.

The only person who truly believes that Ayyadurai invented email is Ayyadurai himself. It must be pretty nice to be able to use the American legal system as a means for legitimizing a false narrative, while bleeding dry any publication that bothers to fact-check those claims.

Update: In an apparent attempt to support his claims, Ayyadurai is appearing tomorrow on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show. Apt.

Update: Mike Masnick, writing in November at Techdirt:

It’s a victory for bullshit. It’s a victory for trying to rewrite history and smear the actual truth. And it was aided by Peter Thiel. I do wonder, though, if Ayyadurai continues to sue publications that properly point out that he is not telling the truth, and targets us, if Thiel will come to our aid. Hell, I’m not even a single-digit millionaire. So, clearly, he’s going to help us out, right?

Apple Celebrates the Tenth Anniversary of the iPhone’s Launch ⇥ apple.com

Apple PR:

January 9 marks the tenth anniversary of iPhone’s blockbuster debut. At Macworld 2007 in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced the world to iPhone as three products in one — “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device.” In the ten years since, iPhone has enriched the lives of people around the world with over one billion units sold. It quickly grew into a revolutionary platform for hardware, software and services integration, and inspired new products, including iPad and Apple Watch, along with millions of apps that have become essential to people’s daily lives.

No press release for the iPhone’s tenth anniversary has been published to the official press release library, but there is one in the “Newsroom”. By contrast, no press release was published at all for the thirtieth anniversary of the Mac in 2014,1 though it was acknowledged onstage on a couple of instances.

I’m not really sure there’s anything to make of this, though. The iPhone is one of the most successful products of all time, so I’m not surprised to see a nod towards it. And, as John Gruber wrote late last year, it’s extremely unlikely that the iPhone that will be released this year will be an “anniversary” model or anything of the sort.

Update: But, for the thirtieth anniversary of the Mac, they did launch a campaign. Thanks to Matt Christensen for the reminder; I completely forgot.

  1. Nor for the 20th and 25th anniversaries in 2004 and 2009, respectively. Apple’s PR library doesn’t go back farther. ↥︎

The Humans and Machines That Built New York’s Second Avenue Subway ⇥ motherboard.vice.com

Derek Mead, Madison Margolin, and Alex Pasternack, Vice:

Back in June 26, 2012, a Second Avenue subway construction crew blasted rock for the future 72 St. Station in Manhattan. At that time, Motherboard dove into the story of the longest-lasting transportation project in New York City’s history. First proposed in 1929 and again in 1951, but persistently hobbled by money woes and community opposition, the Second Avenue subway finally opened this year.

We went underground to see the construction of the subway — controlled explosions, and lots of manpower and machinery — being carried out back in 2013, and again when it opened just a few days ago. We went back this week to see the fruits of one of the largest transportation projects ever mounted in human history. Here is our journey.

Untapped Cities also has an impressive set of photos from the construction of the subway, including a few before-and-afters.

Instagram Gains Support for Live Photos, Wide Colour Gamut ⇥ appadvice.com

Aldrin Calimlim, App Advice:

Live Photos support in Instagram allows you to take any of the GIF-like images you’ve taken on your iPhone and convert it into a back-and-forth looping Boomerang video to be shared on the app’s Stories platform or as a direct message.

[…]

In addition to Live Photos support in Instagram, support for the wide color gamut of the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus has been incorporated into the app. This means that users of the newer iPhones will now be able to see and capture more vivid Instagram images.

Facebook has supported Live Photos since shortly after the iPhone 6S’ debut, so it’s a little odd that it has taken Instagram a full year more to become compatible. Both of these features are delivered via a back-end architectural adjustment, though, so an app update isn’t required. Nice.

On a side note, I haven’t seen an ad in Instagram for several months now. That’s not a complaint.

Medium’s Pivot Caught Its Publishing Partners by Surprise ⇥ politico.com

After Medium announced yesterday that they would be laying off fifty employees and terminating their advertising program, they apparently forgot to give a heads-up to the publishers who moved to the platform in April.

Peter Sterne and Kelsey Sutton, Politico:

Medium’s exit from the online ad business was news to some of its publishing partners, many of whom have come to depend on the publishing platform as a key source of revenue. More than two dozen publications are members of Medium’s revenue beta program, which allows them to sell paid subscriptions to readers and to receive a cut of Medium’s native advertising revenue.

Five members of the revenue beta program told POLITICO that they did not receive any advance notice of Medium’s change in strategy before Williams’ public announcement. One publishing partner only learned about the pivot after reading an article about it on the tech news site Recode.

“Our publishers were informed about the changes by our team in addition to the post,” a Medium spokeswoman told POLITICO.

Via Jason Kottke, who writes:

New businesses are unstable…that’s just the way it is. In Silicon Valley (and in other startup-rich areas), these unstable businesses have lots of someone else’s money to throw around — which makes them appear more stable in the short term — but they cannot escape the reality of the extreme risk involved in building a new business, particularly a business that needs to grow quickly (as almost all VC-backed startups are required to do). All of which can make it difficult to enter into a business arrangement with a startup…just ask publishers working with Facebook or businesses dependent on Twitter’s API or Vine or Tumblr, not to mention the thousands of startups that have ceased to exist over the years.

Couldn’t have said it any better.

DJI Reportedly Acquires Majority Share in Hasselblad ⇥ luminous-landscape.com

Kevin Raber of Luminous Landscape:

Hasselblad still needed to stay afloat. The investors wanted their money and they were not willing to contribute any more to this cause. What now?

Simple, the minority shareholder becomes the majority shareholder. DJI now owns the majority share of Hasselblad. You heard me right. This information has come from numerous, reliable sources. Hasselblad, the iconic Swedish camera company, is now owned by the Chinese drone maker DJI. Sooner or later, this will all become public. Maybe now that I am spilling the beans, it will be sooner rather than later. It seems that everyone inside Hasselblad knows about this, as well as some distributors and resellers. You can’t keep something this big a secret for very long, eventually, it is going to get out.

This is pretty wild. Historically, Hasselblad made some of the best film cameras in — and out of — the world. When everything turned digital, they were left behind, but have since created the wildly successful X1D. After I spent far too long gawping at some sample photos posted by Ming Thein last year, it’s no wonder it has been such a runaway hit.

DJI, meanwhile, builds some of the best semi-professional drones in the world. The attached cameras produce remarkably high-quality video, but I’m worried that Hasselblad’s name will be used to sell products they had little to do with. They’re no stranger to that — they’ve released a lot of rebadged Sony cameras — but their reputation is back on the right track with the X1D. I worry that it will be squandered.

For what it’s worth, both DJI and Hasselblad said that they could only tell me that they “have no further news about DJI’s partnership”, but TechCrunch is confirming Raber’s report.

Missing WatchOS Updates ⇥ twitter.com

Martin Vyderna pointed out today that it has been three weeks since Apple pulled WatchOS 3.1.1 just after it was launched due to allegedly bricking Series 2 models. The update has not yet been reinstated, and I have my doubts that it never will be.

Shortly after the 3.1.1 update was released and pulled — and just before the winter holidays — a build of WatchOS 3.1.3 was seeded to developers. My guess, without knowing anything specific, is that the bug fixes and features in 3.1.1 are considered to be relatively minor, and will be rolled into 3.1.3, likely headed for a release alongside other platform updates. I have no idea why a 3.1.2 version is apparently missing — perhaps it was intended to be the fix for the 3.1.1 update issues.

But, to reiterate, that’s all just guesswork. I’ve asked Apple for clarification, but they never return my emails, and I don’t expect them to on a matter of a minor update. The lack of urgency on this update does make the Watch feel a bit neglected, though.

Weather Line Updated With Today Widget ⇥ macstories.net

Weather Line, my favourite weather app, has been updated for iOS 10. I’ve been testing this release for a couple of months now and it’s a terrific update, with San Francisco used throughout the app, and a new Today widget that shows the trend graph for the next eight hours. It’s the only weather app I use, mostly because of the day’s trend line. You can grab the update free for existing users, or just $3 for new users.

Comparing the Mac Pro’s Price and Performance in 2006 ⇥ macworld.com

Speaking of the Mac Pro, I was reminded today about a time when Apple was proud of the professional Macs they shipped. Until the middle of last year, they had a dedicated page for professional users and case studies.

And then there was the competition. Dan Frakes, Macworld:

If you caught the Mac Pro’s introduction during last week’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, you know that Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide product marketing, punctuated his demo of the new high-end desktop by uttering the “D” word — Dell. Specifically, Schiller brought up Dell to compare its price to the standard 2.66GHz Mac Pro Quad’s $2,499 price tag. By Schiller’s math, a similarly configured Dell Precision 690 would run you $3,448 — around $950 more than the Mac Pro.

Today, you can’t even run a similar comparison because Dell doesn’t offer a Precision tower with a processor as old as the one fitted to the currently-available Mac Pro.

It’s About Trust

A guess: Apple’s greatest asset is the trust users and customers have in them to be doing the right thing for them, whether in the near term or over a longer run. You could say that about nearly any technology company, but here’s another guess: few others require a user’s trust to the extent that Apple does.

Forgive me for pointing out the obvious here, but Apple, unlike its peers, is the only company that makes hardware that can officially run MacOS and iOS. Google and Microsoft may now have their own integrated hardware and software products — in the form of the Pixel and Surface, respectively — but other companies make hardware that runs Android and Windows.

This puts Apple in a position of incredible power and responsibility. Their platforms are exceptional. Even as I complain at length about the myriad bugs and quality issues in MacOS, I’ve also used Windows recently and I can assure you that there’s a gigantic gap. Yet this responsibility, I feel, is something that they haven’t always treated with the respect it deserves.

Chuq Von Rospach, in a rightfully-popular essay on the state of Apple’s 2016:

A big percentage of complaints over the new MacBook Pro devices is that they ignore the needs of the “power” user. I think a better way to define this is that these units define “power user” different than many people who see themselves as power users do, and they’re upset (justifiably) that there aren’t options that allow them to solve their needs.

[…]

It’s been over a thousand days since [the Mac Pro] has seen an update. As Apple’s high end flagship, this is unconscionable. It shows a lack of respect for its high end power users that have depended on it.

Professional and power users are not a large market — at least, not when compared to millions of more average consumers — but they remain integral to all of Apple’s platforms. Developers rely upon the Mac to build great apps for all of Apple’s platforms, and that ecosystem is a key selling point.

And, on the subject of money, pro and power users are more likely to make a far greater investment in Apple’s platforms. A really powerful Mac runs upwards of $4,000, and pro users are far more likely to buy external displays, make large software commitments, and even buy additional computers. The market may be small, but ask a Mac-based professional video editor or composer how much they’ve sunk into their workstation, especially if they’ve been a longtime customer. They could typically have a couple of nice cars for that money.

That kind of investment feels like it has been squandered. No company should be selling the exact same computer for a thousand days at exactly the same price points, but Apple certainly shouldn’t, especially not when it’s a professional Mac. It’s this kind of thing — and continuing to sell outdated WiFi hardware, and not updating the Mac Mini or even the iMac, and reducing the future-proofing of professional Macs — that makes longtime users seriously consider fleeing the platform.

Above all, it feels like an abuse of trust. Many of us have sunk tens of thousands of dollars into Apple’s ecosystem in hardware, software, accessories, and services. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that Mac is dead, or that Apple is doomed. But, as Apple encourages ever greater investment in their entire ecosystem through various inter-device features and cloud services, they’ll need ever-greater amounts of trust. And right now, as a “power” Mac user, I’m more uneasy than I can remember.

Gamifying Health With the Apple Watch ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

There’s something super effective for me about gaming health with easy-to-capture metrics and achievable short-term and long-term goals. I could diet and exercise on my own but I had no idea where to start before; relying on Apple Watch as a coach has totally made the difference for me. Apple Watch has tremendously helped motivate me to change my life for the better and I’m happier for it today.

Even if you — as I — don’t really track your weight or diet, Hall’s story is a great reminder of how the Watch simply makes you aware of your health. The very concept of needing a prompt to stand up or exercise more is a bit deflating, in the sense that this is something that all of us should be doing automatically, but trying to do so regularly when you’re focused on so many things at a sedentary desk job can be a bit tricky.

Silly as it may be, the achievements in Activity got me to start thinking about my physical activity a lot more this past year. I began walking to work in the spring, and continued to walk in at least one direction until partway through November. Since I didn’t want to break my monthly streak, I found a way to use Calgary’s +15 system to walk most of the length of downtown to my apartment. It’s not much, but it keeps me active, even on cold days — Weather Line reports that it’s going to feel like –32°C (about –25°F) around the time I’ll be headed home. It’s encouraging. No matter how ridiculous that may seem, the ends really do justify the means.

Insurance Firm to Replace Human Workers With IBM’s Watson ⇥ mainichi.jp

The Mainichi, with no byline:

Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Co. is planning to slash nearly 30 percent of its payment assessment department’s human staff after it introduces an artificial intelligence (AI) system in January 2017 to improve operating efficiency.

[…]

Fukoku Mutual has already begun staff reductions in preparation for the system’s installation. In total, 34 people are expected to be made redundant by the end of March 2017, primarily from a pool of 47 workers on about five-year contracts. The company is planning to let a number of the contracts run out their term and will not renew them or seek replacements.

The insurance firm will spend about 200 million yen to install the AI system, and maintenance is expected to cost about 15 million yen annually. Meanwhile, it’s expected that Fukoku Mutual will save about 140 million yen per year by cutting the 34 staff.

About a month ago, I finished reading Cathy O’Neil’s excellent “Weapons of Math Destruction” and I’m currently midway through “Data Love” by Roberto Simanowski.1 While finding out why an institution has made a particular decision has always been somewhat difficult, both books make the case that offloading a decision to mass data collection and automation can have disastrous consequences that aren’t fully understood. Furthermore, there’s a sense of certainty and finality to a decision made by a computer program — humans can see nuance and context, but a machine typically doesn’t. And, to make matters worse, the specific rationale for a machine’s decision may never be known because the source code is almost always considered confidential.

This is the direction we’re headed in and, while I don’t want this to come off as curmudgeonly, unregulated and proprietary big data programs are making decisions we don’t fully understand or control. That ought to be concerning.

  1. Both of those links are affiliate links. ↥︎

The Leap Second ⇥ hodinkee.com

Jack Forster, writing for Hodinkee:

There probably were not a lot of us that noticed it during the countdown to midnight, and the New Year, last Saturday, but this year, time needed a tweak. At 23:59:59 on December 31, 2016, an additional second was added to UTC (Universal Time Coordinated, the international time standard) so that, for exactly one second, UTC time was 23:59:60. 

This might sound a little ‘who cares’ for most of us, but managing the Leap Second is, among other things, essential for little things like running the Internet, and ensuring GPS doesn’t think you’re halfway to the Moon when you’re just trying to find your mother-in-law’s house (literally).

Accurate time is also essential for things like HTTPS certificates and, apparently, Cloudfare’s CDN services.

France Gives Workers the Legal Right to Ignore Out-of-Hours Email ⇥ thefader.com

David Renshaw, the Fader:

The French government has passed a law designed to tackle the problems caused by the ‘always on’ culture of staff who are available 24/7 via their phones. As of January 1, employees of companies with over 50 members of staff now have the legal right to ignore emails sent out of office hours. This ‘right to disconnect’ is designed to quell the rise in unpaid overtime, as well as issues like burnout and sleeplessness that a permanent level of accessibility can cause.

It astonishes me that this practice has become so common and expected that it deserves a law to curtail it. Still, why should it apply only to companies with greater than fifty employees?