Day: 23 December 2019

Jason Snell’s 2019 Predictions in Review ⇥ macworld.com

Jason Snell, Macworld:

With the arrival of Mac Catalyst this summer, as promised by Apple last year, the Mac has started to benefit from apps developers originally on iOS. But I predicted that it would be a major onslaught that would dramatically change the Mac forever, and this was my biggest miss. Some combination of a rough summer of developer betas and limitations of the technology itself mean that there aren’t nearly as many Catalyst apps as I thought, and a bunch of my favorite iOS apps still aren’t anywhere close to shipping Mac versions. Catalyst may still change the Mac forever, but it’s going to take a lot more than one year to make it happen.

For users and for the Mac ecosystem, I hope that Catalyst gets better. But there’s a little voice in my head that thinks it would be better if SwiftUI makes the difference and Catalyst is, in the future, a sad and largely-forgotten experiment. There’s a long way to go between today’s iPad apps running on the Mac, and the promised cross-platform apps that feel right on each device.

End the Razor-and-Blades Business Model ⇥ theverge.com

Kim Lyons, the Verge:

Obviously, we won’t see an end to such gadgets because too many products rely on what economists refer to as the “two-part tariff,” where you buy the product (razor, floss dispenser, coffee maker) and then pay a per-unit fee for the items (blades, floss, coffee pods) that make the product usable. Every subscription razor blade company has this figured out: it’s why the razor itself is usually relatively inexpensive, but the specialized blades are pricey.

However, the gadgets that are flooding the marketplace (and Kickstarter) now are a generation removed from razor blades, which actually do take some precision to manufacture. The gadgets I’m ranting about are ones that try to convince you to spend more for a relatively inexpensive, readily available product: floss dispensers with proprietary floss (it’s just string, people); garbage cans with specialty garbage bags; even a manicure machine that paints each fingernail individually using — wait for it — pods of its proprietary nail polish.

The razor-and-blades model simply refuses to die. The Juicero thing happened in 2017, the same year Albert Burneko wrote my favourite thing that has ever been written about Keurigs. HP began offering a subscription model for their printers, which allowed them to claim ownership over the cartridges used and add DRM to prevent third-party refills. This business model is wasteful, expensive, and should be abolished — not expanded.

The Public Cost of Delivering Millions of Parcels Every Day ⇥ buzzfeednews.com

Ken Bensinger and Caroline O’Donovan of Buzzfeed News, reporting alongside James Bandler, Patricia Callahan, and Doris Burke of ProPublica:

Investigations by ProPublica and BuzzFeed News this year revealed that drivers delivering Amazon packages had been involved in more than 60 crashes that led to serious injuries, including 10 deaths. Since then, the news organizations have learned of three more deaths.

Amazon, which keeps a tight grip on how drivers working for contractors do their jobs, has told courts around the country it was not responsible when delivery vans crashed or workers were exploited. It is a position that is facing more legal and legislative challenges, as some states seek to force tech companies such as Uber to take more financial responsibility for the contract workers who underlie their businesses.

Matthew Haag and Winnie Hu, reporting earlier this year for the New York Times:

Officials are racing to keep track of the numerous warehouses sprouting up, to create more zones for trucks to unload and to encourage some deliveries to be made by boat as the city struggles to cope with a booming online economy.

The average number of daily deliveries to households in New York City tripled to more than 1.1 million shipments from 2009 to 2017, the latest year for which data was available, according to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems.

“It is impossible to triple the amount,” said José Holguín-Veras, the center’s director and an engineering professor at Rensselaer, “without paying consequences.”

Households now receive more shipments than businesses, pushing trucks into neighborhoods where they had rarely ventured.

It is perhaps inevitable that some accidents will occur, and Amazon’s total of at least sixty-three since 2015 is lower than, say, Uber’s — they reported nearly one-hundred fatal accidents in 2017 and 2018. But delivery contractors for Amazon are typically driving larger and heavier vehicles that present greater danger to drivers of smaller cars, cyclists, and pedestrians.

In the case of both companies, however, these injuries and deaths — and the congestion described in the Times article — are a result of unproven but eagerly-adopted developments. Many vehicles might not be on the road if it were not for Amazon’s high-pressure rush delivery options. It is worrying that these companies are aware of the negative results of programs like Amazon Prime, but are slow to make changes for the better as they continue to hurry packages along. If they bore some responsibility for the damage they inflict, I imagine things may be different.