Month: June 2019

The Star of WWDC Was Privacy ⇥ macworld.com

Michael Simon, Macworld (fire up your script blockers and get ready to enter your browser’s reader mode):

Apple’s privacy push extends to watchOS, too. One of the main features is an app called Noise, which routinely monitors background sound and alerts you when a sustained sound might be damaging to your hearing. It’s the kind of surprise-and-delight feature only Apple would think of putting in a smartwatch — let alone attempt to implement in an existing consumer product at a massive scale — but Apple also considered something most people wouldn’t think of: All of Noise’s audio processing are done in real time, and Apple doesn’t record or save any of the sounds it hears.

For any other company, that’s not a day one feature. It’s something that’s added following an apology when someone uncovers a secret trove of audio recordings on a server. Or even worse, after said recordings are stolen as part of a hack. The Noise app announcement could have came and went without a promise of privacy and no one would have questioned it. No one would have even thought of it.

Andy Greenberg, Wired:

In upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, the new Find My feature will broadcast Bluetooth signals from Apple devices even when they’re offline, allowing nearby Apple devices to relay their location to the cloud. That should help you locate your stolen laptop even when it’s sleeping in a thief’s bag. And it turns out that Apple’s elaborate encryption scheme is also designed not only to prevent interlopers from identifying or tracking an iDevice from its Bluetooth signal, but also to keep Apple itself from learning device locations, even as it allows you to pinpoint yours.

There’s a lot to like about WWDC this year, as Apple has meaningfully iterated on every single one of its platforms in a big way. But preserving user privacy from design through implementation has been a central theme this year, as well as in years past. And it’s paying off: both Facebook and Google made a show of being privacy-conscious at their respective developer events this year, though neither has proposed altering a surveillance-based business model.

Privacy is rapidly becoming a requirement from the perspective of users as well as the law, and companies that have banked on being able to collect whatever data they want are going to find it hard to adapt. Apple already assumes that you don’t want them to surveil you.

If ‘Big Tech’ Is a Huge Antitrust Problem, Why Are We Ignoring Telecom? ⇥ techdirt.com

Karl Bode, for Techdirt, reacting to the coming antitrust investigations into big tech companies:

Oddly missing from coverage from these probes is the fact that much of this behavior by the Trump administration may (*gasp*) not be driven by a genuine interest in protecting markets and consumer welfare. For one, it’s hard to believe that an administration that has shown it’s little more than a rubber stamp for sectors like telecom is seriously worried about monopoly power. Two, it’s hard to believe an administration obsessed with nonexistent censorship is going to come at these inquiries with integrity, and not, say, as a vessel to pursue a pointed partisan persecution complex.

[…]

Yet again, notice how telecom gets a free pass by the Trump administration? Notice how Silicon Valley is demonized, but telecom’s surveillance and anti-competitive gambits see zero backlash? I don’t think it’s happenstance that this new Trump “big tech” antitrust push comes as big telecom has asked for just such a push to aid its own competitive agenda. A lot of folks on both sides of the political aisle who’d like to see more done to rein in “big tech” seem a touch oblivious to the possibility that this new antitrust push may not be entirely in good faith.

Even if you give this administration a benefit of doubt that it does not deserve, and you assume that the coming antitrust investigations into tech companies will be in good faith and not be driven by a perverse desire to be unabashedly cruel, there is no possible circumstance under which these companies should be investigated and telecom giants should not.

The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2019 ⇥ daringfireball.net

This year’s interview with Greg Jozwiak and Craig Federighi is the best one yet — not just the interview itself, but in video and audio quality as well. A few choice items of interest to me:

  • Contrary to rumours, the TV app that ships with MacOS Catalina is not a Catalyst app. Of the three media apps that iTunes has been split into, only Podcasts is a Catalyst app.

  • Federighi explained the company’s thoughts behind the hard-to-discover gestural elements of the iPad’s user interface. He compared the new three finger pinches for cut, copy, and paste to the keyboard shortcuts on MacOS for the same commands. I’m still not sure I buy the argument that this core functionality is adequately discoverable, but his explanation that the new gestures are more easily remembered and repeated than keyboard shortcuts passes the sniff test.

  • Federighi is the company’s fastest presenter “by far”, according to Joz. He did not disclose the slowest presenter.

Apple Posts Support Document on Transitioning Away From iTunes in MacOS 10.15 Catalina ⇥ support.apple.com

If you, as I, are dependent on iTunes, you’ll be pleased to know that Music in MacOS Catalina is, as rumoured, a light re-skin rather than a wholly new app. The preferences window is still modal; you can still burn discs with it. And, while I know it’s still months from release, it’s still the same app showing the same Apple Music browser and iTunes Store in a janky web view. It is the iTunes you know, just with better organization and fewer non-music features.

If you wanted Apple to truly dump iTunes in favour of the Music app on iOS, this news will probably be disappointing.

Via Stephen Hackett.

Apple’s Global Accessibility Head on the New Features in iOS 13 and MacOS 10.15 ⇥ techcrunch.com

Steven Aquino, TechCrunch:

[Sarah Herrlinger, director of Global Accessibility Policy & Initiatives at Apple] demoed Voice Control to me, and it works as advertised despite our setting containing a lot of ambient noise. The gist of it is simple enough: You give your MacBook or iMac commands, such as “Open Mail” or “Tell Mary ‘Happy Birthday’ ” in Messages. Beyond the basic syntax, however, there are elements of Voice Control that make dictating to your Mac (or iOS device) easier. For example, Herrlinger explained how you can say “show numbers” in Safari’s Favorites view and little numbers, corresponding to the number of favorites you have, show up beside a website’s favicon. Say TechCrunch is No. 2 in your list of favorites. If the glyph is hard to make out visually, saying “open 2” will prompt Voice Control to launch TechCrunch’s page. Likewise, you can say “show grid” and a grid will appear so you perform actions such as clicking, tapping or pinching-and-zooming.

I was blown away by the demo of Voice Control during the Platforms State of the Union presentation and, having had the opportunity to try it myself, it works pretty much as advertised. It’s shockingly good, almost to the extent that I was considering keeping it on so I could use my iPad while I’m cooking, for example, but I worry about its impact on battery life. Happily, you can switch it on temporarily with a simple “Hey, Siri” request. This is one of the most impressive tech things I’ve seen anywhere, and it’s worth trying out even if you don’t need it for using your device.

At WWDC, Apple Furthers Its Privacy Lead ⇥ slate.com

April Glaser, Slate:

To use the internet is to constantly slam into locked doors. Want to watch a video? Please sign in. Care to comment? You’ll need to remember your password. Want to keep reading an article? Create an account. Many of us manage these password requests by using our login credentials from Google and Facebook to register with other websites. Clicking on “Sign in with Facebook” and “Sign in with Google” isn’t exactly frictionless, but it’s close.

[…]

Enter Apple. At its annual developer conference on Monday, the company unveiled a new “Sign in with Apple” button for Apple device users to create new logins on websites and apps. It’s the same idea as those Google and Facebook buttons but from a company that’s known to be far more trustworthy with customer data—and that has been emphasizing its privacy bona fides as the other tech companies have come under scrutiny. But Apple isn’t just offering a third option. Users who opt to create new accounts with Apple can also choose to use a randomly generated email address that forwards messages to their actual inbox, preserving customer privacy even further by allowing users to keep their email addresses to themselves without sharing them with another company. […]

Apple:

Please note these summaries of the latest changes and see the App Store Review Guidelines for full details. All guidelines are now enforced for new and existing apps, unless otherwise indicated.

  • Guidelines 1.3 and 5.1.4. In order to help keep kids’ data private, apps in the kids category and apps intended for kids cannot include third-party advertising or analytics software and may not transmit data to third parties. This guideline is now enforced for new apps. Existing apps must follow this guideline by September 3, 2019.

[…]

  • Guideline 5.1.1(vii) (New). Apps that compile information from any source that is not directly from the user or without the user’s explicit consent, even public databases, are not permitted on the App Store.

  • Guideline 5.1.1(i). Apps must get consent for data collection, even if the data is considered anonymous at the time of or immediately following collection.

[…]

Sign In with Apple will be available for beta testing this summer. It will be required as an option for users in apps that support third-party sign-in when it is commercially available later this year.

Victoria Song, Gizmodo:

If you’ve ever hunted for a period tracking app, you know there’s a crapton of them in the App Store—and not all of them are good. With Cycles, Apple is adding female health tracking to its Apple Watch. Users will be able to log symptoms, as well as receive notifications of upcoming periods and fertile windows. It’ll also be available for non-watch users via the Health app.

The big thing to note here is Apple’s emphasis on privacy. Flo, Glow, Clue, and Ovia are all big-name women’s health apps that have had some not-so-great press regarding what they do with sensitive data. And better yet, integrating it into the main Health app means you don’t have to do any research or pay fees for a basic tracker.

Apple has continued to emphasize the ways in which they do not track you and are not interested in collecting individual user data — instead, preferring to do as much as possible on users’ devices.1 This is great news for the billion or so people who use Apple’s products, and it puts pressure on others to do better. In some cases, that pressure comes as a result of consumer awareness; in others — as with Apple’s requirement that apps which implement buttons to sign in with Google or Facebook also add a Sign In with Apple button2 — it’s more forceful.

As I’ve written previously, though, it remains bizarre to me that this is an argument that Apple can reasonably make: we build products that do not surveil you or allow advertisers to exploit your private data. That shouldn’t be a marketing statement; that should be a baseline requirement for any service, app, or product. I get the frequent framing of these decisions as a luxury only enjoyed by consumers of pricier electronics, but I think that frustration is misplaced. That privacy is somehow not seen as a fundamental right or worthy of strict legal protections is deeply concerning.

  1. To such an extent that, during the live WWDC recording of John Gruber’s podcast, Craig Federighi flipped the script on the common complaint that Apple is ostensibly catching up to Google, et al. on machine learning, according to Chance Miller’s recap:

    In fact, if you watch recent events from the other guys, you’d be surprised to see they’ve started to say on-device machine learning. They’re actually seeing the light on that topic. I think they’re disadvantaged because part of what makes this possible is building this great hardware and the integration of hardware and software. Pulling this off between a random fleet of devices, it’s really just impossible.

    I think Apple’s long-term bet on privacy is starting to become noticeable for the public. ↥︎

  2. Think Google or Facebook themselves will add this option to their apps, or even be required to do so? ↥︎

The New Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR ⇥ apple.com

From the Apple newsroom:

Apple today introduced the all-new Mac Pro, a completely redesigned, breakthrough workstation for pros who push the limits of what a Mac can do, and unveiled Apple Pro Display XDR, the world’s best pro display. Designed for maximum performance, expansion and configurability, the all-new Mac Pro features workstation-class Xeon processors up to 28 cores, a high-performance memory system with a massive 1.5TB capacity, eight PCIe expansion slots and a graphics architecture featuring the world’s most powerful graphics card. It also introduces Apple Afterburner, a game-changing accelerator card that enables playback of three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video simultaneously.

Pro Display XDR features a massive 32-inch Retina 6K display with gorgeous P3 wide and 10-bit color, an extreme 1,600 nits of peak brightness, an incredible 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a superwide viewing angle, all at a breakthrough price point. Together, the new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR are the most powerful tools Apple has ever put in the hands of pro customers and will change pro workflows forever.

Both of these new products are wild, yet largely predictable in a very good way. The Mac Pro’s form factor is a return to the classic professional Mac tower, with a case that can be removed and plenty of easily-accessible slots for upgrades. Fully-loaded, the numbers on Apple’s marketing page speak for themselves: this is a Mac for the highest-end of professional customers. That’s a single-digit percentage of total Mac users, according to Phil Schiller speaking to a small group of reporters in 2017:

First of all, when we talk about pro customers, it’s important to be clear that there isn’t one prototypical pro customer. Pro is such a broad term, and it covers many many categories of customers. And we care about all of these categories, and there’s a variety of different products those customers want.

There’s music creators, there’s video editors, there’s graphic designers — a really great segment with the Mac. There’s scientists, engineers, architects, software programmers — increasingly growing, particularly our App development in the app store. So there are many, many things and people called pros, pro workflows, so we should be careful not to over simplify and say ‘pros want this’ or ‘don’t want that’; it’s much more complex than that.

The segmentation of what Apple thinks of as a “pro” user is fairly recent, and it’s enabled by hardware capabilities that have often outstripped user needs. For example, shipping solid state storage in nearly every Mac means that you can edit RAW photos or HD video on, say, a MacBook Air. It’s not ideal, but it’s not dreadful.

When Apple shipped a new Mac Mini last year, they repositioned it as being capable of pro applications — a sort of entry level pro product. The iMac Pro that was released at the end of 2017 serves the mid-range of pro applications. This Mac Pro is the top end. And, of course, its price matches that. It starts at $6,000 in the United States, and that’s with 256 GB of storage and 32 GB of RAM. Of course, those things can be upgraded by end users, and I would anticipate the highest-spec built-to-order option to come in at well over $30,000.

Then there’s the display, which is equally top-end, and has a bothersome name: “Pro Display XDR”. Why not just “Pro Display”? Its specs are jaw-dropping and, accordingly, so is its price: $5,200 with a VESA mount, or $6,000 with a stand. Or you can buy the display without any kind of mounting option for $5,000, but I don’t know why you would want to do that. Tack on another thousand dollars if you want Apple’s special matte glass instead of a glossy display.1

Apple’s positioning of the display is interesting to me. They compared it against a Sony reference display similar to this one designed for production environments. That was a shrewd move; those monitors are often over $30,000. But even though Apple’s display is calibrated and has different reference modes, I question whether it will be adequate for production environments. I bet footage will still have to be passed through one of those Sony monitors before it reaches theatres or television screens.

These prices and the ridiculous capabilities of these products are exclusive in the truest definition of that word. They exclude huge numbers of customers who either cannot afford to spend over $12,000 on a new computer and display, or do not need such high-end capabilities. I think that’s okay. The iMac Pro remains a very capable machine for all but the most demanding users.

For those users, Apple appears to have delivered in a huge way.

See Also: Ina Fried of Axios explained that she and the rest of the journalists who met for the roundtable two years ago received an in-depth briefing after the keynote.

  1. In my WWDC prelude piece, I wrote that I hoped to see a spiritual successor to the 30-inch Cinema Display. I think we got it. ↥︎

FTC and DOJ to Split Antitrust Investigations Into Major Tech Companies ⇥ reuters.com

Diane Bartz and Jan Wolfe, Reuters:

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, which jointly enforce antitrust laws in the United States, have divided oversight over the four companies, two sources said, with Amazon and Facebook under the watch of the FTC, and Apple and Google under the Justice Department.

[…]

The four technology companies, all with market values in the hundreds of billions of dollars, have drawn scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers around the world over aspects of their business practices, although it was not clear what the U.S. Justice Department or FTC were planning to look at, if anything.

I think it is absolutely worth having an antitrust investigation and discussion around big tech firms; but, not one of the reports around these investigations mentions any investigation into the practices of telecom conglomerates. For Americans, they absolutely amount to having a similar level of power and invasiveness. Broaden the investigation and include them, too.

SF Symbols ⇥ developer.apple.com

iOS 13, WatchOS 6, and tvOS 13 include support for this nice standardized set of symbols from Apple. It’s not a symbol font — though there is a font fallback — but it is designed to work perfectly with Apple’s San Francisco system font. Oddly, MacOS is not supported.

Uber’s Path of Destruction ⇥ americanaffairsjournal.org

Hubert Horan, American Affairs Journal:

Above all, Uber argued that its business model and technology were so innovative that it had created an entirely new industry (“ridesharing”) based on entirely new business concepts (the “sharing economy”). It insisted that it was a “tech company” selling sophisticated software, and could not possibly be compared to taxi companies. In fact, however, Uber carries people from point A to point B, just like taxis have for a hundred years. The “tech company” claim was really an attempt to get people to ignore its huge losses, since tech companies like Facebook had quickly grown into profitability. The “software” claim was designed to justify preventing its drivers from getting the labor law protections employees are entitled to, based on the argument that they were totally independent entrepreneurs who had freely chosen to purchase Uber’s superi or software products. Furthermore, nothing in Uber’s business model is actually being shared. The only meaningful economic distinction between “taxis” and “ridesharing” is that the latter avoids regulations that traditional taxis must still obey and depends on billions in predatory investor subsidies.

Uber’s claim that its growth resulted from customers freely choosing its superior service in competitive markets is fundamentally false. Competitive markets use price and profit signals to help allocate resources to more efficient uses. Uber grew because its years of billion-dollar subsidies totally distorted those signals, and allowed it to drive more efficient producers out of business.

About a year and a half ago, I linked to a couple of pieces arguing that Uber’s most impressive revolutionary gesture would be if the company functioned as a long-term business. They have lost — and I’m going to write this out in full and italicize it — fourteen billion dollars in the last four years. Horan’s analysis of Uber’s performance to date is second-to-none, and he’s reasonably skeptical of attempts to distract from the company’s mismanagement and losses through the invocation of autonomous vehicles.