Month: March 2019

Charlie Whiting Dies Aged 66 ⇥ bbc.com

Andrew Benson, BBC:

Charlie Whiting, the head of Formula 1 for motorsport’s governing body the FIA and one of the most influential people in the sport, has died aged 66.

[…]

Whiting’s death leaves a hole at the FIA – he was the go-to person for teams on all matters pertaining to an F1 weekend.

Australian Michael Masi will take Whiting’s place as race director, safety delegate and permanent starter this weekend in Melbourne.

A huge loss. Tributes have been pouring in all day from current and former drivers, team staff, journalists, and others. Simon Arron of Motor Sport wrote a particularly touching tribute.

App Store Covers RSS Readers ⇥ mjtsai.com

Excellent coverage by Apple — as captured by Michael Tsai — of a software category that has, until recently, been seen as on the verge of death largely because of increasingly-siloed methods of news consumption.

Murdoch’s Myopic Antitrust Concerns ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sherisse Pham, CNN:

Rupert Murdoch’s Australian media company is calling for the breakup of Google, saying the US tech company wields too much power over news outlets and online advertisers.

News Corp Australia said breaking up the tech giant is a “very serious step,” but insisted that “divestment is necessary in the case of Google, due to the unparalleled power that it currently exerts over news publishers and advertisers alike,” according to a submission to Australian regulators published on Tuesday.

Anthony Ha, TechCrunch:

More than a year after the deal was first announced, it looks like Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox is about to close.

Disney announced today that the deal is “expected to become effective at 12:02 a.m. Eastern Time on March 20, 2019,” suggesting that it has obtained the final approval needed, specifically from regulators in Mexico.

21st Century Fox was spun off in 2013 from News Corp, but both are chaired by Rupert Murdoch. After this acquisition, Disney’s bevy of franchises and assets will dominate the box office — including virtually all control over the rights to Marvel characters — and will have significantly greater control over Hulu, television stations, and production studios worldwide.

I am still digesting the discussion around Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to break up tech companies, but it’s pretty rich to hear that argument echoed by one company chaired by a guy who made nearly $8 billion selling off another of his companies, thereby reducing competition in the entertainment space.

‘River of News’-Style RSS Reader and Reeder 4 Beta ⇥ beta.reeder.ch

“Exciting developments on the RSS front” is not a phrase you can use every day; but, today is an apt day to use it. Rob Fahrni announced that he’s working on a new app that aims to deliver RSS updates as a constant stream, like a Twitter app. I like the simplicity of this and, with the right discovery options, it could be a great introduction for those who use social media for news and would prefer a reverse-chronological feed.

Also released today was the first public beta of Reeder 4 for MacOS. Reeder has always been one of the best RSS clients around and, in the first day I’ve spent with the fourth major version, I’ve found it to be just as well-designed and thoughtfully considered as its predecessors but with some excellent new features.

Without creepy user targeting or algorithmic manipulation, website feed readers may be relatively quaint, technologically, but they put users in control of their reading experience. I think the hardest question for RSS readers is how it could gain broader interest outside of the more technically sophisticated user group. As I wrote earlier this year, website feeds need to be surfaced in an obvious and easily understood way. I’m not sure what that looks like. Maybe feeds just need a new brand.

Adam Clark Estes Has Scratched His iPhone XS’ Display ⇥ gizmodo.com

Adam Clark Estes, Gizmodo:

I’ve had my iPhone XS for a little over three months, and it’s driving me crazy. Not the whole thing. The phone is beautiful, fast, a joy to use. What’s driving me crazy is an increasingly complex network of scratches on the display glass. The first ones were small, almost unnoticeable at a glance. Then, about six weeks after I spent well over $1,000 upgrading to the iPhone XS, a ribbon-shaped abrasion appeared on the screen and then another. The worst part is that Apple is pitching a fit about fixing it.

This is more-or-less the same article Estes wrote last year; except, then, there were loads of reports of scratched iPhone 8 and iPhone X displays. This batch of iPhones doesn’t seem to have the same issue. In his iPhone XS review, John Gruber confirmed that these displays should, according to Apple, be the least prone to scratching and shattering, while Michael Tsai wrote that his iPhone XR doesn’t have any noticeable scratches yet. So, while Estes’ display may well be scratched up, it doesn’t appear to be indicative of a trend. The reports are, so far, mixed.

Here’s why I’m linking to this, though. Estes:

Unfortunately for me, AppleCare can’t solve my scratch problem. In multiple conversations with both Genius Bar employees and Apple Support, I was told that surface scratches were treated as cosmetic damage and were not covered. One Apple employee slyly suggested that if my screen somehow developed a crack in it, I could get the entire display replaced for just $30. If I just wanted to replace the display as it was, scratches and all, Apple would charge me $280. And replacing the display would be the only way to rid myself of the scratches. There was no magical buffing machine in the back of the Apple Store and no way to replace the glass itself.

This is the complete opposite of my experience with AppleCare and a scratched display. I began noticing the degrading quality of my iPhone X’s display just a couple of months into owning it. They were just hairlines, but they built up throughout the year to the point where, eventually, I asked my local Apple Store if I could use one of my accidental damage claims to get the display swapped. They only asked if I was sure, but they were happy to do the repair.

Apple Officially Announces March 25 Event, ‘It’s Show Time’ ⇥ twitter.com

As reported last month by John Paczkowski of Buzzfeed News, Apple has officially announced an event for March 25. They’re calling it “It’s Show Time” — if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because they launched the first video-capable iPod, the second generations of the iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle, and movies on the iTunes Store at a 2006 event with nearly the same name.

Accordingly, you can expect to see some form of video subscription product and probably something similar for newspapers and magazines. New iPads, second-generation AirPods, and the long-delayed AirPower charging mat might also see the light of day, and there are signs that Apple Pay Cash might be expanding beyond the United States in the near future, too.

You May Have Forgotten Foursquare, But It Didn’t Forget You ⇥ wired.com

Paris Martineau, Wired:

Ask someone about Foursquare and they’ll probably think of the once-hyped social media company, known for gamifying mobile check-ins and giving recommendations. But the Foursquare of today is a location-data giant. During an interview with NBC in November, the company’s CEO, Jeff Glueck, said that only Facebook and Google rival Foursquare in terms of location-data precision.

You might think you don’t use Foursquare, but chances are you do. Foursquare’s technology powers the geofilters in Snapchat, tagged tweets on Twitter; it’s in Uber, Apple Maps, Airbnb, WeChat, and Samsung phones, to name a few. (Condé Nast Traveler, owned by the same parent company as WIRED, relies on Foursquare data.)

In 2014, Foursquare launched Pilgrim, a piece of code that passively tracks where your phone goes using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, and GSM to identify the coffee shop or park or Thai restaurant you’re visiting, then feeds that data to its partner apps to send you, say, an offer for a 10 percent off coupon if you leave a review for the restaurant. Today, Pilgrim and the company’s Places API are an integral part of tens of thousands of apps, sites, and interfaces. As Foursquare’s website says, “If it tells you where, it’s probably built on Foursquare.”

I’m sure many apps and services from the earliest days of the App Store are dead now, but I wonder what happened to the ones that aren’t. In either case, I wonder what happened to stored user data — particularly private and personally-identifiable details. Was all of it securely wiped from servers, in the case of a company shuttering? What kind of highly-private data is still lingering on servers and development machines worldwide that has simply been forgotten about by users who have moved on to other apps and services?

Leica Launches the Q2 ⇥ dpreview.com

Dan Bracaglia, DPReview:

The Leica Q2 is a fixed-lens, full-frame camera sporting a new 47.3MP sensor and a sharp, stabilized 28mm F1.7 Summilux lens. It’s styled like a traditional Leica M rangefinder and replaces the hugely popular original Leica Q (Typ 116), launched in 2015.

The Q2 looks essentially the same as its predecessor, but under the hood notable improvements have been made including the addition of weather-sealing, better battery life, a new processor and an improved electronic viewfinder. Sensor resolution has also nearly doubled.

So far, I’ve seen that they’ve fixed at least two of the three major complaints I’ve had with my first-edition Q: they’ve weather- and dust-sealed the body, and they’ve redesigned the on/off control on top so you don’t have to be super precise to select single capture mode. They haven’t changed anything that I love about the camera, from its perfect lens to its wonderful macro control and, judging by the samples I’ve seen, its gorgeous capture quality. If they’ve fixed the Q’s terrible lens cap that falls off all the time when the lens hood is attached — my only other major complaint — this is a home run.

Apple Is Now Commissioning Original Artwork for Apple Music Playlists ⇥ theverge.com

Bijan Stephen, the Verge:

Records should have good art. For albums as diverse as London Calling, Horses, and Fear of a Black, the images on their covers were as recognizable as the music on the wax. While Apple Music isn’t a record label (yet), it did recently decide to add original art to its playlists. Its goal was to bring that instant recognition to its own content, so the company enlisted everyone from the creator of the iconic AC/DC logo to the person who designed the art for Migos’ chart-topping album Culture to make it happen.

The artwork is meant to “connect more directly with the communities and the culture for which they were intended,” says Rachel Newman, Apple’s global director of editorial. Before now, Apple’s playlists had a uniform presentation that didn’t necessarily speak to the music. “In many ways, it’s a visual representation of the music that you will find inside that playlist,” said Newman. That includes Hip Hop Hits, Dale Reggaetón, and The Riff, which are all immensely popular.

Original artwork is something that Apple seems to be taking seriously, from this to the App Store. This is especially interesting to me:

“The connection to music is — it has always been about kind of a tribe or a culture,” Newman said. “I just think that the difference is, these days, that there are just so many more of them.” In the old days, you’d be able to tell the style of music on a record by what was on its cover. (In a really general sense.) Newman said some of that artistry has been lost over time. “I think so many of these artists had done that work, and even those who hadn’t were very close to a lot of that work,” she said. “And I think just love the concept of being able to be a return to that kind of lost art in many ways.”

The kind of art Newman is talking about, of course, is still immediately recognizable. That’s part of what makes it special. Apple Music is going for the same thing, even though it’s hard to tell what kind of impact that art might have today. Streaming services are fundamentally distribution mechanisms for other people’s work, and it’s generally the work that matters. That said, it’s a competitive advantage to have the packaging and marketing of other people’s work be as high value as possible because it enhances the user experience. In that light, giving a platform a visible human touch becomes a very good idea.

A few years ago, Spotify launched a new identity that made heavy use of duotone artwork to unify the disparate photographs and illustrations provided by musicians’ representatives. Though that prescriptive identity has shifted somewhat in recent years, the overall feel of Spotify’s custom art is very much tied to their identity. It’s a uniform, more or less.

But the playlist covers Apple is creating and commissioning are all over the place. Some are illustrative and bright, while others are based on photos. Some are greyscale, and some are a Spotify-esque duotone. The only unifying characteristic is the Apple Music logo in the upper-right. I’m a little conflicted about this. There’s no solid identity for what constitutes an Apple Music playlist, and everything I’ve seen seems to be experimental without necessarily being cohesive. It’s a little less confident than most design we see coming from Apple. However, it’s very true to its medium; these playlist covers are as varied as album covers and feel almost more integrated because of that.

The Uber-Style Servant Economy ⇥ theatlantic.com

Farhad Manjoo, writing in 2015 in the New York Times:

The larger worry about on-demand jobs is not about benefits, but about a lack of agency — a future in which computers, rather than humans, determine what you do, when and for how much. The rise of Uber-like jobs is the logical culmination of an economic and tech system that holds efficiency as its paramount virtue.

“These services are successful because they are tapping into people’s available time more efficiently,” Dr. Sundararajan said. “You could say that people are monetizing their own downtime.”

Think about that for a second; isn’t “monetizing downtime” a hellish vision of the future of work?

Manjoo, again, in a 2016 piece in the Times:

But Uber’s success was in many ways unique. For one thing, it was attacking a vulnerable market. In many cities, the taxi business was a customer-unfriendly protectionist racket that artificially inflated prices and cared little about customer service. The opportunity for Uber to become a regular part of people’s lives was huge. Many people take cars every day, so hook them once and you have repeat customers. Finally, cars are the second-most-expensive things people buy, and the most frequent thing we do with them is park. That monumental inefficiency left Uber ample room to extract a profit even after undercutting what we now pay for cars.

But how many other markets are there like that? Not many. Some services were used frequently by consumers, but weren’t that valuable — things related to food, for instance, offered low margins. Other businesses funded in low-frequency and low-value areas “were a trap,” Mr. Walk said.

Another problem was that funding distorted on-demand businesses. So many start-ups raised so much cash in 2014 and 2015 that they were freed from the pressure of having to make money on each of their orders. Now that investor appetite for on-demand companies has cooled, companies have been forced to return sanity to their business, sometimes by raising prices.

In a fantastic article published today, Alexis C. Madrigal of the Atlantic assessed over a hundred Uber-for-x companies and found that, while there were mixed economic results with the companies themselves, the analysis revealed a deeper common truth about this style of company:

The inequalities of capitalist economies are not exactly news. As my colleague Esther Bloom pointed out, “For centuries, a woman’s social status was clear-cut: either she had a maid or she was one.” Domestic servants—to walk the dog, do the laundry, clean the house, get groceries—were a fixture of life in America well into the 20th century. In the short-lived narrowing of economic fortunes wrapped around the Second World War that created what Americans think of as “the middle class,” servants became far less common, even as dual-income families became more the norm and the hours Americans worked lengthened.

What the combined efforts of the Uber-for-X companies created is a new form of servant, one distributed through complex markets to thousands of different people. It was Uber, after all, that launched with the idea of becoming “everyone’s private driver,” a chauffeur for all.

The pitch for these kinds of services is that our cars are usually stationary, our spare bedrooms are usually empty, and we might have some spare time to deliver tacos in our neighbourhood. But this isn’t what has been happening. Ride-sharing drivers were once able to make a modest living driving full-time for a single service; now, they’re making half what they used to, so they drive for multiple services and for longer hours — still without the benefits of true full-time employment. Meanwhile, wealthy people buy up multiple properties for Airbnb, which may skirt or even break commercial lodging regulations.

This is an unfair economy which, because it is still so dependent on venture capital funds, is also unsustainable in its current form.

German Regulators Tell Tesla to Stop Advertising Prices With Fuel Savings Estimate ⇥ reuters.com

Christoph Steitz, Reuters:

Tesla had displayed the 56,380 euro ($63,811) original price for the Model 3 online as well as a price of 51,380 euros when taking account of estimated fuel savings of 5,000 euros over five years, Wettbewerbszentrale said.

“Even if ‘savings’ could be realized, such an amount cannot be deducted from the purchase price or the monthly rate … because customers must pay the full price at the time of purchase or financing,” the association said.

I asked Canada’s Competition Bureau about Tesla’s pricing over the weekend and received a response this morning. While their spokesperson could not comment on the specifics of this incident and couldn’t even tell me whether they had received any complaints about Tesla at all, they did give me a statement about estimated cost savings more generally. In part:

Fine print that expands on, or clarifies possible ambiguities in the main body of an advertisement, is unlikely to mislead consumers, assuming that the general impression of the advertisement is not otherwise misleading. The potential to mislead consumers increases significantly when a disclaimer is used to restrict, contradict or somehow negate the message to which it relates. If the main body of the advertisement creates a materially false or misleading general impression in itself, before any reference is made to a disclaimer, then fine print may not do much to alter the general impression in a way that ensures that consumers will not be misled.

I don’t know whether Tesla factoring estimated gas savings into the total cost of the car is misleading from a legal standpoint, but it feels dishonest. It also lacks confidence. Does Tesla not think that the Model 3 can effectively compete at $47,600 in Canada?

The MacBook Hierarchy of Needs ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I might love an SD card slot and a return of MagSafe and for Apple to keep the headphone jack around, but in the end, there are adapters that will bridge those gaps if need be. No adapter will solve the problem of an unreliable or unpleasant keyboard or replace a display. That’s where Apple must supply something that works for everyone — and if the needs of its users are varied, it should offer a variety of products that can fulfill those needs. A one-size-fits-all approach can work, but only if you’re really successful with the choices you make. With the 2015 MacBook keyboard design, Apple missed the mark — and still forced the result into every single new laptop it designed.

It is worrying to me that this even needs to be stated. Imagine if the iPhone or iPad shipped with a display that didn’t accurately register touches after a couple of months. Unfathomable; and, yet, that’s basically the situation for Apple’s entire notebook lineup.

This shitty keyboard was basically the reason that, earlier this year, I bought an iMac that was last updated in 2017, rather than a much fresher MacBook Pro. My partner is also looking to upgrade her MacBook Air right now, and she absolutely wants to keep using a Mac notebook. Her choices are to buy now and pick up AppleCare for when it inevitably needs to be serviced, or to wait until the summer to see if it has been fixed. I’m sure lots of people are facing the same dilemma — a dilemma that does not need to exist. It should not exist. A keyboard should be reliable by design, and that should go without saying.

Berndnaut Smilde’s Ephemeral Sculptures ⇥ nationalgeographic.com

Daniel Stone, National Geographic:

Berndnaut Smilde creates fluffy clouds in locations where nature never would place them. The Dutch artist’s sculptures last five seconds — 10 seconds tops — before they disappear.

Smilde’s ongoing project, called “Nimbus,” explores the visual effects of clouds. A church or museum interior looks different behind a cloud, and an everyday cloud is peculiar in a castle or a canyon. Each scene is made more intense by lasting only moments.

Via Jason Kottke, who introduced to me the concept of an “ephemeral sculpture”, in those words. I think that phrase is a beautiful idea unto itself: a physical object that only briefly exists.

Mark Zuckerberg Spews Some Bullshit About Facebook Becoming a ‘Privacy-Focused’ Communications Platform ⇥ buzzfeednews.com

Ryan Mac, Buzzfeed News:

In a Facebook post that is thin on specific details and titled “A Privacy-Focused Vision For Social Networking,” Zuckerberg outlines a future in which his company will build tools to help users communicate privately, using secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging and ephemeral stories. If Facebook, which has often made promises about privacy and fallen short, is able to execute this plan, it would mark a monumental shift in how the company operates, and more importantly, how it conducts business.

“I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms,” Zuckerberg writes. “Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”

Is anyone falling for this bullshit? Facebook is a company that is defined by its creepy need to know everything to the extent that it rushes from scandal to scandal concerning its use of private data, headed by a man who puts tape over his laptop’s webcam and bought up all of the houses around his own just so he could tear them down for additional privacy.

If Facebook truly is going to build private, encrypted services for its users, it’s not because the company’s culture has radically pivoted to embrace the value of privacy. This is more likely a tactic, rather than a goal for its own sake.

Update: Bryan Menegus, Gizmodo:

My main question is, when Mark Zuckerberg wants to have an intimate, encrypted conversation with friends that won’t stick around to haunt him years later, what software does he use?

Great question.

Adi Robertson, the Verge:

Since 2017, Chinese law has required online services to store user data within its borders. Several overseas tech companies formed partnerships with local businesses, including Apple, which raised privacy concerns by migrating data to servers controlled by the state-run China Telecom last year. (Apple has said it’s still maintaining strong user privacy.) Google is facing its own firestorm over the prospect of a censored Chinese search app, although no such app has been released and the company does not maintain servers in China.

Facebook seems to be taking a harder line. If Zuckerberg holds to this promise, he’s effectively locking Facebook out of the Chinese market for the foreseeable future. And he’s implying that any company dealing with “places where [data] won’t be secure” is endangering the future of privacy.

In theory, it doesn’t matter where encrypted user data is stored. You could drop a hard drive full of highly-classified American government documents into North Korea and, if it’s properly encrypted, there is no practical need to worry. Even so, China’s legal system doesn’t necessarily have the same checks and balances as in many other countries. A concern is that Apple could be compelled to give up their iCloud encryption keys for Chinese users.

Zuckerberg trying to lecture Apple on privacy is just cute. While he may now be dismissive of offering services in China, Facebook’s history in the country indicates that the company tried desperately to launch there, even creating a method to censor posts in compliance with Chinese government policies. Zuckerberg’s post doesn’t come from a virtuous place; it’s just frustrated spin for a plan that didn’t come to fruition.

Updates on Apple’s Supply Chain for 2019 ⇥ apple.com

Apple:

Apple today released its 13th annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report detailing how the company is expanding educational opportunities and protecting the planet’s resources. As of 2018, 17.3 million supplier employees have been trained on workplace rights, and 3.6 million have received advanced education and skills training. All final assembly sites for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods and HomePod are now certified Zero Waste to Landfill, while conserving billions of gallons of water and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

From the report (PDF):

It takes multiple pieces of protective film to cover an Apple product during its journey on the assembly line. Film is placed and removed to help keep products pristine as they come to life. Each piece is small, but it adds up to being a significant portion of the non-recyclable waste generated during assembly.

We set our sights on a solution — finding a new protective film that could be diverted from incineration and, instead, recycled. After conducting research, it became clear that no recyclable protective film was available on the market. This introduced an opportunity for Apple engineering teams to partner closely with a protective film supplier.

The turning point for the project was identifying a combination of adhesive and film that could be recycled together. The result? A cost neutral, recyclable protective film that in its first year of adoption, diverted 895 metric tons of waste from incineration and avoided 1880 metric tons in carbon emissions from Apple manufacturing. Better yet, the film has also been made available by the supplier for other companies to adopt in their manufacturing processes.

Maddie Stone, in Gizmodo’s environmental imprint Earther:

Two years ago, the company announced that it hopes to stop mining the Earth “one day.” Since then, Apple has embarked on a clandestine, multi-front war against waste, finding new sources of materials in everything from manufacturing scrap to dead devices. And by periodically trumpeting small milestones—a robot that can rip apart 200 iPhones an hour; a MacBook Air with a “100 percent recycled aluminum” case — the tech giant reminds the world it’s progressing toward its goal of a mining-free future.

But the truth is that goal remains a distant one. For a company that sells over 200 million smartphones a year, along with millions more tablets and computers, achieving what sustainability wonks call a “circular economy” will amount to a complete overhaul of everything from how Apple devices are manufactured to what we do with those devices at the end of their lives. It will require Apple to develop — or facilitate the development of — groundbreaking new recycling technologies. Perhaps most crucially, Apple will have to make design and policy choices that encourage consumers to upgrade and repair their old devices rather than discard them for the latest model.

The question is whether that’s a future Apple truly wants — or one that its investors will allow.

I completely understand the cynicism here. I haven’t seen another giant tech company — in particular, any other major hardware company — approaching environmental matters in the way Apple has, but I also think there is a valid question to be asked of whether Apple truly is the leader in its field or whether others are making more substantial moves, just more quietly. One would assume that, if another company were an environmental leader, they would want everyone to know. And if Apple wants to be perceived as a leader, their techniques ought to stand up to journalistic scrutiny and questioning.

But there were parts of Stone’s piece that, I feel, are misguided in trying to raise suspicion. For example, regarding the company’s extensive use of aluminum (and please forgive me for quoting at length):

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that Apple’s push to end mining has begun with a focus on reducing one of its biggest sources of manufacturing waste — aluminum. Mining bauxite and smelting it to produce the silvery metal is incredibly energy-intensive, and Apple requires a lot of high-grade aluminum to carve the signature “unibody” cases its computers use. Problematically, the milling machine process it uses also generates a lot of scrap.

So, Apple has started collecting that scrap, melting it down and forming new hunks of aluminum that can be used to carve more gadget husks.

While Apple would not say when exactly it started “recycling” aluminum in this manner, it had crept into the company’s environmental reports by 2016. By 2018, Apple had gotten good enough at saving scraps that it was creating entire product lines out of them. The 2018 MacBook Air and MacMini are the first Apple products to be produced with a “100 percent recycled aluminum” case, using an alloy made of “shavings of recaptured aluminum that are re-engineered down to the atomic level.” This change, along with the use of less aluminum overall, helped cut the carbon footprint of the devices roughly in half, according to Apple.

Critics are quick to point out that Apple is packaging what is essentially a shrewd business decision as a win for the environment.

“Their milling-machine approach to manufacturing is incredibly wasteful, so they’d have to recapture the metal or it wouldn’t be economical,” Kyle Wiens, CEO of the electronics repair company iFixit, said in comments emailed to Earther, adding that aluminum was the “lowest hanging fruit” on Apple’s 100 percent recycling pledge.

I don’t think it’s a surprise that environmentally-savvy moves can also be great for business. Why scrap something when it could be used in the production of another product? Also, Apple has repeatedly stated that one reason they choose aluminum is because it is so easily recyclable. That may mean it’s the “lowest-hanging fruit”, but it isn’t at all unfair for Apple to point out that it’s a critical part of their products’ environmental design.

Basically, Apple made a great decision a long time ago to invest in aluminum because it makes more durable, nicer, and more environmentally-friendly products, and has spent the years since extolling those virtues. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be suspicious of.

Fifteen Million Fewer Americans Are Using Facebook Now Compared to 2017 ⇥ marketplace.org

Kimberly Adams of Marketplace interviewed Larry Rosin of Edison Research:

Kimberly Adams: In your survey you found an estimated drop of 15 million fewer Facebook users in the U.S. today than in 2017. That’s just in the U.S. Is this a meaningful drop for Facebook?

Larry Rosin: I don’t see how you couldn’t say it’s a meaningful drop. Fifteen million is a lot of people, no matter which way you cut it. It represents about 6 percent of the total U.S. population ages 12 and older. What makes it particularly important is if it is part of a trend. This is the second straight year we’ve seen this number go down. Obviously, the U.S. is the biggest market, in terms of dollars, and it’s going to be a super important market for Facebook or anybody who’s playing in this game.

[…]

Rosin: We only show trace numbers of people leaving social media altogether. They’re obviously just transferring their usage. The big gainer, interestingly, is under the same roof as Facebook. It’s their co-owned Instagram.

Facebook has insidiously covered themselves for any eventuality. They acquired Whatsapp and Instagram to ensure that ostensibly alternative choices are still Facebook’s, while in developing nations they’ve locked users into the platform, where the company is virtually synonymous with the internet as a whole.

Thunderbolt 3 Becomes USB 4 ⇥ arstechnica.com

Peter Bright, Ars Technica:

Fulfilling its 2017 promise to make Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free, Intel has given the specification for its high-speed interconnect to the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that develops the USB specification. The USB-IF has taken the spec and will use it to form the basis of USB4, the next iteration of USB following USB 3.2.

Making Thunderbolt royalty-free and not dependent on an Intel controller chip would likely be of considerable interest to a company that may want to build the protocol into a non-Intel platform. I wonder if any company in particular comes to mind.

AirPods as a Status Symbol ⇥ theguardian.com

Elena Cresci, the Guardian:

Of all the widely ridiculed tech products, Apple’s AirPods have experienced an extraordinary turnaround. Back in 2016, they were roundly mocked by the tech industry. Tiny wireless earbuds? It seemed like a recipe for disaster – streets would be littered with these lost headphones, which would clutter up city pavements like discarded gloves and babies’ socks.

[…]

But fast-forward to 2019 and, somehow, the £159-a-pair little pods have transformed into a bona fide status symbol. Diana Ross has a pair, Kristen Stewart wears them and a woman in Virginia has even started a cottage industry by turning them into earrings for people (which does solve the problem of inevitably losing them).

2 Chainz:

These are called “life savers”. That’s right: AirPods. I love them for the same reason that you love them for.

You know you love something because, as soon as you think you lost them, the whole world has to stop until you find these again. I’ve lost them a couple of times, but I’ve found them a couple of times, so we’re even.

The original modern status symbol headphones were the white earbuds that came with the iPod. Those were overtaken by Dr. Dre’s Beats models — which, of course, Apple now owns. But I don’t think anything matches AirPods as both a status symbol and a daily essential.

And they still don’t work with my ears, which is upsetting.

What Using an iPhone SE Is Like in 2019 ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Every time Apple restocks the clearance site, available iPhone SE models go quick, suggesting there’s still quite a lot of interest in the 4-inch device. We recently picked up an iPhone SE to see just what it’s like using one in 2019.

[…]

On the plus side, it’s so small and light that it’s easy to use one handed, something you can’t necessarily do with Apple’s biggest iPhones. With its aluminum backing, the iPhone SE is more durable than Apple’s new all-glass smartphones.

[…]

You might think it’d be noticeably slower than newer iPhones, but, surprisingly, for built-in apps it’s speedy. When using Mail, Messages, Calendar, FaceTime, and other similar built-in apps, the iPhone SE is as speedy as 2018 iPhones.

iOS 12 is impressively fast on the iPhone SE. The similar perceptible speed between the SE and late-model iPhones is notable, too. I wonder how much of that is attributable to the much higher-resolution displays of newer iPhones, and how much is simply down to hardcoded animation timing.