Month: June 2020

An American Spring of Reckoning ⇥ newyorker.com

Jelani Cobb, the New Yorker:

The American Spring has not toppled a power, but it has led to a reassessment of the relationship between that power and the citizens from whom it is derived. It has resolved any remaining questions regarding Donald Trump’s utter ineptitude as President; it has laid bare the contradictory and partial democracy that the United States holds before the world as exemplary. Most significant, it has clarified our terms. Floyd’s life is the awful price we have paid for a momentarily common tongue, a language that precisely conveys what we are speaking of when we say “American.” Fourteen successive days of protest opened the possibility that George Floyd died in America, not simply in its black corollary. The task that remains is to insure that more of us might actually live there.

I don’t mean to undermine the way Cobb frames this as specifically American, but it is also heartening to see how its intentions and message have spread across the world. Brits are throwing statues of enslavers into the sea; Canadians are coming to terms with our own history of racism.

Hey, Nah

Yesterday, Basecamp began sending invitation codes to people who had previously registered interest in Hey, its much-anticipated new email-like product. Hey has a bunch of quirky new features that, unsurprisingly, cannot entirely be shoehorned into existing email protocols so, while it uses SMTP, it does not support IMAP or POP. Users must use the proprietary Hey suite of apps to access their @hey.com inbox, and cannot use other email addresses within Hey’s apps.

The company says that its apps are all “full-featured native apps” but its desktop apps are Electron-based. That’s not entirely relevant to this post, but it is my policy to shame websites masquerading as native apps.

Anyway, while Apple was busy touting the results of a study it funded that estimated the total economic footprint of the App Store at over half a trillion dollars in 2019, the company was also rejecting a bug fix update to the already-approved Hey app for iOS.

David Pierce, Protocol:

Hey does cost $99 a year, but users can’t sign up or pay within the iOS app. It’s an app for using an existing outside service, just like Basecamp’s eponymous platform — and Netflix and Slack and countless other apps. “So we were like, OK, maybe we just got the Monday morning reviewer,” Basecamp co-founder and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson said. Lots of developers over the years have found that their app-review luck sometimes depended on who happened to be looking, and whether they’d had coffee yet. So Basecamp fixed more bugs, submitted a new version — 1.0.2 — and hoped for the best.

The app sat in the queue for review, then in the “under review” status for far longer than usual. Then Waugh got a phone call. The Apple reviewer said he was calling because the new app hadn’t resolved the issue with rule 3.1.1. The issue had been escalated internally, and Apple had determined it was a valid rejection — the only way to move forward would be to implement Apple’s payments system. And not only that: Waugh was told that Apple would like a commitment and a timeline for implementing the payment system, or Apple might be forced to remove Hey from the App Store entirely.

When Waugh and Basecamp pointed out that there were many other apps — even email apps like Spark or Edison — that allowed users to log in to their existing accounts without signing up through Apple, the reviewer told them they wouldn’t discuss other apps. And that was that.

It’s hard not to quote Pierce’s piece at length because it is so comprehensive. Pierce says that Apple admitted that it shouldn’t have approved the app in the first place; Apple also said that Hey doesn’t qualify as a “reader” client app nor is it a business-focused software-as-a-service app, so it apparently must implement Apple’s own in-app purchases API. This is news.

David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp:

We did everything we were supposed to with the iOS app. Try downloading it (while you can?). You can’t sign up, because Apple says no. We don’t mention subscriptions. You can’t upgrade. You can’t access billing. We did all of it! Wasn’t enough.

This extraordinary rejection comes on the very same day that the European Commission announced that it was opening two antitrust investigations into Apple’s business practices. One concerns Apple Pay, and the other is about the App Store; obviously, the latter will be my focus. The Commission:

The Commission will investigate in particular two restrictions imposed by Apple in its agreements with companies that wish to distribute apps to users of Apple devices:

(i) The mandatory use of Apple’s own proprietary in-app purchase system “IAP” for the distribution of paid digital content. Apple charges app developers a 30% commission on all subscription fees through IAP.

(ii) Restrictions on the ability of developers to inform users of alternative purchasing possibilities outside of apps. While Apple allows users to consume content such as music, e-books and audiobooks purchased elsewhere (e.g. on the website of the app developer) also in the app, its rules prevent developers from informing users about such purchasing possibilities, which are usually cheaper.

Apple’s response, via Manton Reece:

It’s disappointing the European Commission is advancing baseless complaints from a handful of companies who simply want a free ride, and don’t want to play by the same rules as everyone else… We don’t think that’s right — we want to maintain a level playing field where anyone with determination and a great idea can succeed.

This is the worst, most insulting statement from Apple that I’ve ever seen. Everything in it is backwards.

There remains a fair argument that Apple can take some cut of sales made through the App Store and its own in-app purchase APIs, though I think 30% is too high. Apple maintains the store, offers marketing benefits, and pays for hosting, distribution, and credit card fees. But, as subscriptions have become the preferred way to charge for apps — a shift encouraged by Apple — the App Store commission increasingly seems like a form of rent-seeking.

Add to that Apple’s prohibition on references of any kind to digital purchases being available outside of iOS apps — a prohibition that extends to website materials linked from within an app — and things begin to look ridiculous. Amazon finds itself in a situation where it can sell paperbacks through its app and offer samples of Kindle books, but cannot sell Kindle versions without giving 30% of the sale to Apple, nor can it explain why or where the book can be bought. Spotify faces a similar quandary with its subscriptions, and its complaint to the E.U. is cited as a triggering factor in the Commission’s investigation. I’ve written about that complaint, which I think has problems.

Regardless of what you think about Apple’s rules and restrictions, none of the above prohibitions apply to Hey’s rejection. The Basecamp team explicitly designed around Apple’s rules and ensured that there were no references to subscriptions or billing from within the app. It’s possible that this is a mistake but, as it has already gone through the dispute process, it appears to be entirely deliberate. A reversal would only be responding to the negative press coverage this has generated.

Apple’s response to the E.U. antitrust investigation says that all apps in its store are subject to the same rules, but that is plainly not true, either. The way Apple is splitting hairs in Hey’s service offering and refusing to compare it to other apps is grossly unfair. The reason I included a detailed description of how Hey works at the outset of this post is because this appears to be the main difference between it and any other email app. But that is an undocumented, unclear, and almost wilfully pedantic interpretation.

Meanwhile, bigger tech companies like Netflix, before it stopped offering in-app purchases, negotiated sweetheart deals with Apple to take a 15% cut on every subscription instead of 30% for the first year and 15% for subsequent years. Then there are the “premium subscription video entertainment” providers who, in exchange for implementing many tvOS features, have been allowed to use their own in-app purchasing mechanism instead of Apple’s APIs, allowing them to keep the entire subscription cost.

WWDC begins in six days. Apple is using the lead-up to strongarm a well-known developer following its policies and issue dishonest statements and press releases about competition in the App Store on the same day that the E.U. announced an antitrust investigation into these practices. Audacious.

An Apple-Funded Study Indicates Over $500 Billion in ‘Facilitated’ Commerce in 2019 ⇥ apple.com

Margaret Harding McGill, reporting for Axios last week:

House antitrust investigators are pressing Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook to say by Sunday whether their CEOs will testify as part of the Judiciary Committee’s tech competition probe, Axios has learned.

[…]

The Judiciary Committee this week sent the companies letters, seen by Axios, seeking documents and answers to the CEO testimony question. The panel wants to hold a hearing with the executives next month.

By extraordinary coincidence, Apple’s U.S. Newsroom — and only its U.S. Newsroom — today published the results of an Apple-funded study conducted by Analysis Group:

Apple today announced the App Store ecosystem supported $519 billion in billings and sales globally in 2019 alone. The new study, conducted by independent economists at Analysis Group, found that the highest value categories were mobile commerce (m-commerce) apps, digital goods and services apps, and in-app advertising. The results encapsulate the full sweep of the dynamic, competitive, and flourishing app economy, which has unleashed a torrent of innovation across 175 countries and revolutionized the way the world learns, works, and connects.

The study reveals that the direct payments made to developers from Apple are only a fraction of the vast total when sales from other sources, such as physical goods and services, are calculated. Because Apple only receives a commission from the billings associated with digital goods and services, more than 85 percent of the $519 billion total accrues solely to third-party developers and businesses of all sizes.

The key words in the study and the way Apple describes it are “facilitated” and “supported”. That means that dinners ordered through DoorDash, goods bought through the Amazon app, and transactions made through Venmo or WeChat are all estimated in this study as being commerce facilitated by the App Store.

That assessment is not entirely unfair. It’s very possible that, had delivery apps not existed, you would not have had a takeout dinner from an independent restaurant and, instead, ordered pizza or bought groceries. But it is not likely that you would not have eaten dinner at all. The App Store and the software offered through it can certainly take credit for enabling new ways of paying for stuff.

But this study also introduces some curious framing to the mix. Here’s what I mean (PDF):

Earlier this year, Apple reported that earnings it has paid to app developers who sell digital goods and services through the App Store or within their apps totaled more than $155 billion worldwide since 2008, with a quarter of those earnings paid in 2019. Such direct monetization through the App Store occurs through paid apps and digital content or services obtained using Apple’s in-app payment system.

While such direct monetization of apps is substantial, it significantly underestimates the size of the Apple App Store ecosystem. This is because developers can choose to monetize their apps in different ways, including several that do not involve transacting directly through the App Store. These other monetization strategies include selling digital goods and services outside of the App Store that can be used within apps on Apple devices (such as streaming apps), selling physical goods and services (such as grocery delivery apps), and offering ad-supported content (such as social networking apps).

Did you catch that? “Selling physical goods” is, apparently, just another way of monetizing an app. While you might consider apps from DoorDash or Amazon just native front-ends for their business, this study reverses that logic and suggests that the apps’ existence is facilitated by the goods and services sold through them.

This study, conducted by three antitrust experts at Analysis Group, is damn near a transparent attempt to buttress Apple’s forthcoming defence of antitrust arguments made against its App Store conduct. Its overall logic is, more or less: iOS apps allow lots of goods and services to be purchased through them, and the App Store provides those apps; therefore, the App Store can take some responsibility for the vast amount of money passing through those apps. I do not think it this argument is entirely wrong, but it takes an extraordinary leap of faith to believe that, had the App Store not existed, these products and services would not be sold. “Facilitated” is certainly an all-encompassing word to describe the App Store’s role in these transactions.

Apple Publishes More Information About WWDC 2020 Labs, Adds Mac Version of Developer App ⇥ developer.apple.com

David Smith:

Details in the Developer app for the WWDC Labs. Looks like you request day before with a specific question/Radar, then they review and assign them. Then they are done via Webex audio/screen share.

Apple:

Your appointment confirmation email will include your appointment time and duration (between 10 and 55 minutes, depending on the lab). It will also include a link to a Webex audio call where you’ll connect with an Apple engineer and can share your screen if you wish. Recording is not allowed; be ready to take notes. Please do not share confidential information during your appointment.

Taylor Lyles, the Verge:

Apple has released a Mac version of its Apple Developer app, a week before its Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off. Apple initially launched the app in late 2019, but it was only available to iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV users.

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

The design suggests that this is yet another Mac Catalyst app, à la the Podcasts and TV apps — it features the same sidebar-based interface — and offers the same features as the iOS version.

Stephen Hackett:

It’s cool that the Apple Developer app is on the Mac, but why is the text so tiny? Why can’t I increase the size of that list of videos to read their full names?

It also requires MacOS Catalina.

Update: I put together the above before I had a chance to play around with Developer for MacOS. Now that I’ve spent some time with it, it looks and feels very similar to every other MacOS Catalyst app. Text is blurry and too small on my non-Retina MacBook Air because it’s being drawn at a different size and then scaled, everything happens in one window, and clicking on sections in the sidebar takes a few tenths of a second to activate. If you click the “Full Screen” button, videos still aren’t shown at full screen, though they do fill up the entire window.

What’s even more frustrating is that the sidebar-based Mac app would make a decent iPad app if its controls were optimized for touch. The iPad app is, more or less, just a bigger version of the iPhone app.

Norway Pulls Its Contact Tracing App After Privacy Watchdog’s Warning ⇥ techcrunch.com

Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch:

One of the first national coronavirus contacts-tracing apps to be launched in Europe is being suspended in Norway after the country’s data protection authority raised concerns that the software, called “Smittestopp,” poses a disproportionate threat to user privacy — including by continuously uploading people’s location.

[…]

Unlike many of the national coronavirus apps in Europe — which use only Bluetooth signals to estimate user proximity as a means of calculating exposure risk to COVID-19 — Norway’s app also tracks real-time GPS location data.

The country took the decision to track GPS before the European Data Protection Board — which is made up of representatives of DPAs across the EU — had put out guidelines, specifying that contact-tracing apps “do not require tracking the location of individual users”; and suggesting the use of “proximity data” instead.

All these stories about unnecessarily invasive data collection sure are starting to make me question the Washington Post’s report about the more privacy-friendly approach recommended by human rights experts and implemented by Apple and Google.

Apple Asked Developers About Their App Store Experiences ⇥ mjtsai.com

An email from Apple to developers:

We love feedback.

Tell us about your experience managing, marketing and distributing apps for the App Store.

Wil Shipley at the end of a comprehensive reply:

I’ve filled out three or four of these surveys before. I know Phil specifically says he doesn’t want to hear about upgrade pricing any more, but Phil is also working for the world’s richest company, which sells hardware and gives software away. Those of us who only sell software can’t afford to give it away.

Michael Tsai:

Ryan Jones:

  1. What is your age?

  2. What platforms do you dev for?

  3. DO YOU LOVE AR?!?!! PLEASE?!?! RIGHT NOW?

It’s weird how pushy Apple is being with augmented reality.

Yes, especially given that dedicated augmented reality hardware doesn’t really exist yet. There are a handful of good AR experiences, but most of the ones I’ve tried feel like technology demonstrations.

Despite Global Reach, Big Tech Companies Still Lack Diversity ⇥ engadget.com

Yesterday, Snap held its partner summit and it was generally well received. Instead of simply being a more-or-less static video of an executive presenting slides, Evan Spiegel was shown on a virtual stage. A typical live conference presentation was obviously not possible because of the combination of infection prevention measures and understandable civil unrest over racist police violence, both of which Spiegel touched on in his presentation.

Despite publicly acknowledging that black lives matter, Spiegel was a little more cagey at a Tuesday company meeting.

Paige Leskin, Business Insider:

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said at an employee all-hands meeting on Tuesday that the company would continue to keep its diversity report private, according to notes from the meeting obtained by Business Insider and confirmed by current employees.

At the meeting, Spiegel said releasing diversity data would reinforce the idea that minority groups are underrepresented in the tech industry. The implication, one source told Business Insider, was that the report would make the company look bad at a time of increased focus on representation.

Spiegel told employees that the company’s diversity numbers were in line with those at other tech companies, which have long skewed white and male. His comments come just days after former employees shared accusations on Twitter of racism they experienced and witnessed while working at Snapchat.

Dare Obasanjo:

The icing on the cake of my recent tweet storm on tech diversity reports is Snapchat refusing to publish one because it’ll just make them look bad and openly saying that’s the reason.

A lack of diversity at major tech companies is not news, but it gained more attention towards the beginning of the last decade with articles about, for example, Evan Spiegel’s gross frat boy emails.

Beginning in 2014, tech companies began publicly releasing stats about the diversity of their staff. I used to cover these reports but, over time, tech companies slowly drifted in their commitment to reporting these numbers in a timely fashion. Apple’s current public stats are from 2018, for example.

It is upsetting to see that, nearly six years later, the numbers remain similar across the board for racial and ethnic diversity, while representation of women in tech has improved only slightly.

Nicole Lee, Engadget:

Y-Vonne Hutchinson, the CEO and co-founder of ReadySet, a diversity solutions firm that works primarily with the tech industry, acknowledges that it’s good that the companies are even willing to release such statements. (Hutchinson is also a co-founder of Project Include, a non-profit group dedicated to increasing diversity in tech.) “A couple of years ago, most companies weren’t even willing to say the phrase ‘Black Lives Matters,” she said. “I think it’s a positive indication that the Overton Window has moved to such a point where it feels obligatory for companies and brands to come out in support of the movement.”

However, Hutchinson thinks that words aren’t nearly enough. “These statements aren’t necessarily backed by real action,” she said, pointing out that the words ring hollow when the companies themselves do not have a good history of diversity and amplifying Black voices.

“For me, I don’t even look at these statements any more,” said Hutchinson. “I look at diversity reports. I look at the investment in your teams. I look at your executive team and your leadership team. To me, that’s a real indication of your commitment to change. If you’re not hiring, promoting, being led by and investing in Black people, and if you’re not firing the people who are racist, then you know a statement doesn’t mean so much.”

All that matters is action. I understand that some of these actions take time, but it is deeply dispiriting to see how little has changed after six years of shining a spotlight on this problem.

Pocket Casts and Castro Podcasts Removed by Apple From App Store in China Upon Government Request ⇥ techcrunch.com

Rita Liao, TechCrunch:

Before June each year, content and media platforms in China anxiously anticipate a new round of censorship as the government tightens access to information in the lead-up to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

This year, Chinese users lost access to two podcast apps — Pocket Casts and Castro Podcasts. Neither app is searchable within Apple’s Chinese App Store at the time of writing.

Pocket Casts:

Pocket Casts has been removed from the Chinese App store by Apple, at the request of the Cyberspace Administration of China. We believe podcasting is and should remain an open medium, free of government censorship. As such we won’t be censoring podcast content at their request.

Marco Arment’s alter ego “Overcast”:

I haven’t been contacted about the Apple-China censorship of podcast apps, but Overcast’s servers have been blocked in China for years, so it already didn’t work.

Castro is an iOS-only app, but Pocket Casts is cross-platform. It appears to also be unavailable in the Google Play store when the location is set to China, though two apps with suspiciously similar icons are. According to Liao, Apple’s first-party podcast app1 also remains in the App Store in China, but its feeds are censored.

I see a similar question of responsibility in intervention by social media companies into users’ posts and Apple’s approach to the App Store in China. Without users, social media companies wouldn’t exist; without native third-party apps, I doubt that the iPhone would be the revolutionary product it is. But, where third party apps create a unique selling point for the iPhone in the vast majority of the world, the App Store is something of a liability in China from Apple’s perspective. China can — and does — block Twitter and Facebook, but it would be foolish to block the App Store outright.

It’s not a great situation to be in, especially given the usual stance Apple takes on civil rights. But, aside from opening up the iPhone to apps from outside the App Store, I can’t think of a great way for the company to avoid this conflicted situation.

  1. “Podcatcher” was not a wildly successful term. ↥︎

iCloud, Backups, and Time Machine — Oh My ⇥ tidbits.com

A couple of links related to iCloud and backups today. First, Adam Engst of TidBits:

I had no idea that Apple deleted iCloud backups after 180 days, and a quick poll in the TidBITS Slack channel showed that it wasn’t common knowledge among other TidBITS staffers and contributing editors.

[…]

On the one hand, it makes some sense that Apple would want to delete device backups — which can be quite large — that no one is ever going to want to use again. With hundreds of millions of devices backing up to iCloud, the storage requirements boggle the mind.

But on the other, what was Apple thinking?!? Deleting a user’s one and only backup, particularly without clear documentation in the user interface and express warning of the pending deletion, is simply unacceptable.

This is clearly an edge case — how many people attempt to restore from six month old backups? — but edge cases must be accounted for. The bare minimum would be an emailed notice to the user.

Erica Sadun: (Update: Sadun has pulled this post .)

Let me tell you a little bit about my backup paranoia. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for daily local backups. I use Backblaze to store offsite. Both are terrific products. I love them and depend on them and they saved me when, in January, my Mac mini’s fusion hard drive failed big time.

[…]

I started paying for iCloud in December in order to better support my children’s photography habits, using a family plan. With all that space, I had the brilliant idea (not) of moving my writing work over to iCloud documents, so I could access the information from a variety of machines and devices.

That worked great until I accidentally overwrite my entire Xcode workshop file and discovered that Time Machine Does Not Backup iCloud and it had not been long enough after a day of writing for CCC and Backblaze to capture the file to their backup, as they will reliably do during the night.

I kind of get why it would be redundant to create local backups of documents hosted in iCloud, but redundancy is almost always preferable in the context of backups. Perhaps there is a technical reason,1 but it is a silently-added wrinkle in what is supposed to be a seamless integration.

(Update: On further testing, it appears that some but not all iCloud Drive data is backed up with Time Machine.)

Sadun:

I suspect my Twitterbase is way more likely to take advantage of things like Time Machine’s version control features than the average population. Only about 10% of respondents said they even bother with version control. Translate that now to the macVerse and I wouldn’t be hugely surprised, honestly, if Apple deprecated Time Machine soon, especially with the huge iCloud oversight.

I sincerely hope this never happens. On principle, some form of computer backups should be integrated at the system level for every operating system. I still think it makes no sense that Apple has not tried to compete with Backblaze — not that I am eager to dump Backblaze or anything, but it seems so obvious to me that users ought to be able to back up all of their devices to iCloud.

  1. There is no good reason for why I think this, but I have a hard time trusting the way iCloud Drive works in MacOS. Everything is stored within ~/Library/Mobile Documents/, which is a directory — according to the file command — but does not behave like one. You can ls it, but you cannot open it as a directory in Finder; it just goes to the iCloud Drive item in Finder’s sidebar.

    You can also navigate its internal structure by command line, but the directories for each app display as empty in the Finder. App directories are invisible at the top-level iCloud Drive view.

    I fully recognize that this is an irrational mistrust, and my shame compels me to admit it only in footnote form. ↥︎

Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump ⇥ craigmod.com

Craig Mod:

Hardware has literal and metaphorical edges — it must be fully complete and largely bug free to ship. Software? It’s far more amorphous, like mist. Patches can be endlessly pushed. It never ends. Faulty hardware can destroy a company. Faulty software can be patched. The butterfly keyboard debacle may never be lived down. Even as I type on this improved Magic Keyboard, I can’t help but wonder: Did they really test this thing? I had three butterfly keyboards die on me, twice in the field. Not fun. Hardware failures live long in the mind.

Meanwhile, software problems are quickly forgotten once patched, but grate daily until that happens. It’s not hard to imagine that the easy distribution of bug fixes has encouraged less stringent quality control.

Mod references Mail’s data loss problems and Finder’s bizarre instability and file system misreporting as he writes:

The three primary pieces of software on macOS are probably Finder, Safari, and Mail. To have two of these show signs of instability is like ordering a salad and having half the lettuce appear as ceramic roofing tiles. It’s just weird. It shouldn’t happen, especially when these are new, critical bugs in decades-old programs. It makes you wonder what else might be broken, and what’s broken with the development cycle to allow for these bugs to ship.

It’s not just two apps — it’s all three. Under Catalina, Safari’s address bar has become languid and unresponsive, and it will sometimes activate the existing URL instead of the one you typed. That is a problem with what seems like very basic functionality for a web browser. (Update: Matt Sephton first filed this bug in 2012, so it’s clearly not just a Catalina thing. How is this an eight year old bug?)

There have and will always be software bugs. But I wish for more attention paid to fit and finish bugs, and more investment in the feel of everything. One final example: if I take a picture using the Camera app on my iPhone and then switch to Messages to send it to someone, it takes a beat too long to show the photo thumbnails in the message thread. However, the process of switching between those apps is fluid and joyful on my iPhone X; I just wish I could say the same about the rest of the software stack.

Location Permissions in Android 11 Mimic Those in iOS ⇥ theverge.com

Dieter Bohn previewed the Android 11 beta for the Verge and I wanted to highlight one new thing:

Android 11 also follows a trend Apple started last year: one-time permission. Now, when an app asks for location information, the only three options that get buttons are “while using the app,” “only this time,” and “deny.” The one-time use option is new and much-appreciated. If an app wants to get permanent background permission, it has to deep-link you into its location permissions inside Android’s settings. Google seems to be discouraging that kind of use.

I wonder if Tile will add Google to that lawsuit they filed against Apple for, in part, introducing these kind of privacy-focused location permissions.

Say Goodbye to iTunes U and iBooks Author ⇥ macrumors.com

Alison DeNisco Rayome, CNet:

Apple will discontinue its iTunes U app for remote education at the end of 2021, replacing it with the newer Schoolwork and Classroom apps, the tech giant said Wednesday on its support page.

The move doesn’t come as a surprise: iTunes U hasn’t received a feature update since 2017. And as most schools moved online during the coronavirus pandemic, the Schoolwork app recently got an upgrade to let teachers manage assignments and information for students remotely through the cloud. Meanwhile, the Classroom app can also turn the iPad into a teaching assistant, helping teachers guide students through lessons and track progress.

I believe this is partly my fault.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today sent out an email to iBooks Author users, letting them know that the Mac app is being discontinued on July 1 and removed from the App Store.

In the email, Apple says that following the inclusion of book creation tools in Pages, the company’s new focus will be on developing features for the Pages app.

I don’t think either one of these announcements is a surprise; these apps have suffered from inattention for years. But Apple’s rocky approach to education needs and lack of clear strategy cannot be confidence-inspiring for schools or teachers who need to decide what technology to use in their classrooms.

Sonny Dickson Says a Redesigned iMac Is Coming at WWDC ⇥ 512pixels.net

More Mac scuttlebutt today courtesy Sonny Dickson:

New iMac incoming at WWDC. iPad Pro design language, with Pro Display like bezels. T2 chip, AMD Navi GPU, and no more fusion drive.

The iMac is the last Mac that you can buy with a spinning hard disk — the base model doesn’t even have a Fusion Drive — and its incongruity with the rest of the lineup shows in the dismal performance of APFS-formatted hard drives.

Via Stephen Hackett:

How this works with today’s report in Bloomberg that the ARM Mac transition is going to be announced at WWDC. I would be really surprised if any ARM Macs ship this summer, but why wouldn’t they want to usher in a new design with the new chipset? When Apple switched to Intel, most of the new Macs looked like their outgoing PowerPC siblings, but that doesn’t have to the be the case this time.

Aside from developer kits, I don’t expect to see any ARM Macs debut this year to consumers. If this new iMac does debut in conjunction with WWDC this year, I see no reason it would not have an Intel processor.

It would be kind of bizarre to see the announcement of the ARM transition and the debut of an all-new iMac in the same presentation. But maybe it’s a rational choice — a way to show people who were planning on buying a new Mac that there’s no reason to wait, and to indicate that the transition will be smooth.

Update: Paul McGrane:

It does have a fascinating, though probably coincidental parallel. The final iMac G5 in the end of 2005, was somewhat redesigned from the previous 2 models, and was the first iMac with an iSight camera and a remote control.

The Intel iMac in January 2006 looked exactly the same.

Terrific memory on McGrane’s part. The first iMac G5, released in 2004, had an entirely flat back; the version that replaced it about a year later sported the now-familiar curved back. It also dropped the 56k modem.

The President Parrots an Insane Conspiracy Theory About the Elderly Activist Shoved to the Ground by Police Officers Last Week ⇥ theroot.com

Stephen A. Crockett Jr., the Root:

By now, we’ve all seen the horrific footage of 75-year-old Martin Gugino being shoved to the ground by two Buffalo, N.Y., police officers during a George Floyd protest Thursday. […]

Yes, you read this correctly: the President of the United States is suggesting that Gugino is possibly an antifa operative who was working to block police radios, and I just… I don’t even know what to make of this. In fact, I’ve typed several times that the President of the United States believes that a 75-year-old man who was shoved to the ground by police, with blood pouring from his head, is really a secret agent for a political protest movement, and I don’t even know what to make of it.

Rashaan Ayesh, Axios:

The conspiracy theory, which originated on the far-right blog Conservative Treehouse, made its way to the president via a report on One America News Network, a small Fox News rival with a history of conspiracy-focused reporting. It highlights just how far the president’s media consumption can veer from the mainstream.

Bruce Potter:

Having built things that do RF scanning, the idea that at close range they have to be directional is just not right. Further, this scanner can apparently “black out” comms? Again, this is the stuff of aliens/sci-fi movies. Now millions will think [it’s] possible AND randos have them.

Every single information security professional I could find reacted to this theory with a sort of laughing incredulity. It is staggering that anyone would believe this, but I suppose it shouldn’t be since morons are burning down radio towers because they believe that 5G waves caused the novel coronavirus to spread.

It is not news that the president of the United States gets his information from sources that serve primarily to flatter him, nor is it surprising that he has a difficult time telling reality from fiction. He is not a smart man. But in an age of institutional failure and justified unrest, he is using his inherently powerful platform to malign an elderly activist and spread the wet droppings of a fringe blog and Sputnik-adjacent cable network.

Update: Facebook employee Brandon Dail:

Trump’s attack on Martin Gugino is despicable and a clear violation Facebook’s anti-harassment rules. It’s again extremely disappointing that we (and Twitter) haven’t removed it.

The amount of mental gymnastics required to assume good intent and ignore impact are astounding.

I’ve been trying to write something about the moderation policies of Twitter and Facebook, but it changes radically by the day and I am exhausted. I hope to publish more on this soon.

For now, let’s acknowledge how bizarre it is that Twitter will carefully moderate direct calls to violence by the president and his lackeys, but won’t intervene when the president uses his enormous platform to couch aspersions in phoney questions. Meanwhile, Facebook is happy to let the president say whatever he wants.

Bloomberg: Apple Set to Announce ARM Transition for the Mac at WWDC ⇥ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing to announce a shift to its own main processors in Mac computers, replacing chips from Intel Corp., as early as this month at its annual developer conference, according to people familiar with the plans.

The company is holding WWDC the week of June 22. Unveiling the initiative, codenamed Kalamata, at the event would give outside developers time to adjust before new Macs roll out in 2021, the people said. Since the hardware transition is still months away, the timing of the announcement could change, they added, while asking not to be identified discussing private plans.

This will be the third CPU architecture transition for the Mac, after switching from the Motorola 68k series to PowerPC, and then from PowerPC to Intel. If the first ARM Macs begin shipping to customers early next year, that will mean a fifteen year lifespan for the Intel architecture. That compares to twelve years for PowerPC processors, and just ten for Motorola.

By all accounts, I think, the Intel transition went especially smoothly: the company announced its intentions at WWDC 2005 and, by Macworld 2006 — about seven months later — the company was selling its first two Intel-based products in the form of the iMac and MacBook Pro.

My expectations for this transition are very similar. Because the Bloomberg family of publications carry serious business news, it seems that there is one caveat per Gurman scoop. Even so, it would be shocking to me if the ARM transition were announced at any event except WWDC. If this project becomes public at any point this year, you will hear about it two weeks from now.

The biggest question in the lead-up to the Intel announcement in 2005 was whether existing applications would be supported. Apple’s response was Rosetta — an invisible translation layer that allowed simple PowerPC applications to run on Intel at acceptable speeds. Gurman’s story today builds lightly on his report from April, but does not add any information about this key question.

Update: Jesper:

Even if all of these are handled in the most inclusive way possible, unless there’s some sort of extra bone thrown towards Mac Pro users, who now have seen a platform long-neglected, then ostensibly rebooted, twice, back-to-back, the future for the Mac Pro as the value proposition it currently occupies is murky at best. Forming a Pro team and taking everybody out for a ride of gradually coming to terms with actual people’s actual needs only to decide that they are no longer a priority would be unspeakably stupid. Unless Mac Pros will live on in the current form, there’s more to this, although maybe not revealed immediately at this year’s WWDC.

With USB4 subsuming Thunderbolt 3, it’s not impossible that Mac Pro could just get AMD’s best performing CPUs in them and gain an impressive boost. (Although there’s other Intel technology to worry about, such as the wireless video standard one that powers Sidecar.)

Gus Mueller:

Will Apple release ARM based Macs this year? I hope so, I think the upside is huge. We’ll lose things like VMware and other x86 based applications which will be sad, but if it brings better performance and longer battery life, I’m all for it.

I’m hoping that this is transitioned better than a clean break between Intel and ARM Macs. Even though I don’t plan on buying a new Mac for years, it already sucks when I can’t open some 32-bit app on my MacBook Air running Catalina.

I was reading Jason Snell’s MacOS 10.16 wish list today, and he concludes a section about improving Catalina’s frustrating security restrictions like so:

I don’t need macOS to become less secure. I do think Apple needs to the work to make it easier for users to use their Macs, their apps, and their files without the operating system getting in their way.

Good computing gets out of the way. Apple’s software and hardware, at the best of times, gets out of the way. In my ideal world, Apple’s ARM Mac transition will erect the fewest barriers for users and be as seamless as possible. We shall see.

Sarah Cooper, the Trump Lip-Sync Genius ⇥ latimes.com

Greg Braxton, Los Angeles Times:

[Sarah Cooper] gives much of the credit for her newfound success to “the writing, which is so good.” She explained, “Trump is an amazing comedy writer without realizing it. There were so many moments I was able to use. I put the video out within a few hours of him saying those words. A lot of people said they saw the parody before they saw the real thing, which made it not only good content but newsworthy.”

Trump’s stumbles remind her of her former career as a designer for Google, where she was required to attend a stream of monotonous meetings where much was said but little was accomplished.

“When Trump started doing those daily briefings and being confronted with how incompetent he is and how out of his element he is, I was just reminded of being in the corporate world and seeing people BS-ing through a meeting, making their coworkers think they know things when they really have no idea what they’re talking about,” Cooper said.

It has been said elsewhere before, but this president is impossible to parody through exaggerations. There’s just no air between his real-world statements and Alec Baldwin’s “Saturday Night Live” script. But Cooper cracked the formula: his exact words, stripped of the legitimacy of his office and the pantomimed straight-faced coverage of television reporters, is a disarming and hilarious formula.

The Kind of Rebel We Need ⇥ nytimes.com

Sarah Jackson, writing for the New York Times in 2018:

[Anthony Bourdain] was not just curious about food and the world. He was aware that injustice and inequality are systemic issues, and he never shied away from pointing that out. He regularly humbled himself before people very unlike him, he asked careful questions, and he listened. Before our eyes, he was always learning, and trying to make the world just a little better.

We live in a time when the simplest protests against racial injustice by athletes and celebrities are considered divisive, and when admitting imperfection while striving for righteousness and truth makes you a rebel. Perhaps that partly explains why people called the curious and empathetic Mr. Bourdain a “bad boy.” If that’s the case, let’s have more like him. May his compassion and indignation live on.

It has been two years since Bourdain’s death and Jackson’s tribute to his work and what he hoped to represent continues to ring true. For those of us who are privileged because of the colour of our skin or our gender, his ability to be an ally while consciously trying to avoid becoming a white saviour should be a model — even considering his misses.

Malaika Jabali, Glamour:

Bourdain is gone, this much is true. But as society pushes forward to answer the hard questions about what kind of world we want for the future, how inclusive and how understanding we want to be, it’s important to know that “allyship” is not something you bestow upon yourself.

It’s not your equivalent of street credibility because you went to a protest.

It is, as Bourdain showed us, the way you live your life and make room for others. It’s being inclusive and understanding without being boastful. It’s looking inward and being self-aware. And it’s never claiming it for yourself.

Protesting works; publicly showing the hunger for change is good. But for those of us who are privileged to live a life without facing hardship because of who we are, it is vital to be so much better. For the sake of humanity, we should all aspire to be able to be described in words such as these.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: ‘Reflections on the Color of My Skin’ ⇥ haydenplanetarium.org

Neil deGrasse Tyson, writing on the Hayden Planetarium’s website:1

In 1991, Rodney King (age 25) was struck dozens of times, while on the ground, by four LAPD officers, with their batons, after being tased. The grainy 1990s video of that went media-viral, inducing shock and dismay to any viewer.

But I wasn’t shocked at all.

Based on what I already knew of the world, my first thought was, “We finally got one of those on tape.” Followed by, “Maybe justice will be served this time.” Yes, that’s precisely my first thought. Why? Since childhood my parents instilled in me and my siblings, via monthly, sometimes weekly lessons, rules of conduct to avoid getting shot by the police. “Make sure that when you get stopped, the officer can always see both of your hands.” “No sudden movements.” “Don’t reach into your pockets for anything without announcing this in advance.” “When you move at all, tell the officer what you are about to do.” At the time, I am a budding scientist in middle school, just trying to learn all I can about the universe. I hardly ever think about the color of my skin — it never comes up when contemplating the universe. Yet when I exit my front door, I’m a crime suspect. Add to this the recently coined “White Caller Crime,” where scared white people call the police because they think an innocent black person is doing something non-innocent, and it’s a marvel that any of us achieve at all.

The rate of abuse? Between one and five skin-color-instigated incidents per week, for every week of my life. White people must have known explicitly if not implicitly of this struggle. Why else would the infamous phrase, “I’m free, white, and 21” even exist? Here is a compilation of that line used in films across the decades. Yes, it’s offensive. But in America, it’s also truthful. Today’s often-denied “white privilege” accusation was, back then, openly declared.

Marques Brownlee used Tyson’s essay as a jumping-off point for his own video essay based on his experiences in sports and tech:

You know, I remember several instances where I would accomplish a goal, or I’d make a high-end team, and I was super proud of it. But then that spotlight would appear again and I’d sort of second-guess that, where I’m like “did I make this team because I’m good enough, or did I make this team because I have this platform and they want to take advantage of that, or did I make this team because I’m black and they just want to make sure they have a black person?” I’m looking around like “well, they got one” but suddenly I’m second-guessing myself, like “am I good enough to make this team?”

[…]

Not only is racism obviously unacceptable, but we actually have to actively work against it. And there’s always, somehow, people twisting that, making it political, making it, like, a two-sided thing. I don’t understand how being anti-racist can possibly be controversial in any way.

We must be active participants in correcting the ills of our society.

  1. I am somewhat conflicted about linking to this after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct were made against Tyson in late 2018. Those accusations were apparently resolved last year, but I do not know whether the outcome was satisfactory for the women who accused him. With that caveat in mind, I believe his voice is vital in this context. ↥︎

Supercuts of Police Brutality Against Demonstrators Are Receiving Millions of Views ⇥ nytimes.com

The actions are not new; what is relatively recent is the ability to broadcast the behaviour of police officers to the world. Like many, I’m reminded of Chris Rock’s “Tambourine” special: “I know it’s hard being a cop, but in some jobs, everybody gotta be good. American Airlines can’t be like ‘well, most of our pilots like to land’.”

This has never been a case of “a few bad apples” — a proverb that is too often corrupted by truncation because the end of that phrase is “spoil the bunch” — it is a case of a rotten system that has created domestic military forces with little accountability out of racist police precincts.

See Also: Carlos Maza.

Google Sued for $5 Billion for Tracking People in Incognito Mode ⇥ cnet.com

Carrie Mihalcik, CNet:

Google faces a proposed class action lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of invading people’s privacy and tracking internet use even when browsers are set to “private” mode. The suit, filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Google violates wiretapping and privacy laws by continuing to “intercept, track, and collect communications” even when people use Chrome’s incognito mode and other private web browser modes.

“Google tracks and collects consumer browsing history and other web activity data no matter what safeguards consumers undertake to protect their data privacy,” reads the complaint. The search giant surreptitiously collects data through Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, website plug-ins and other applications, including mobile apps, according to the complaint.

I’ve read the suit (PDF) — it’s a bizarre argument that accuses Google of lying in its documentation about how much private browsing mode protects users from its data collection methods. As Michael Tsai points out, Chrome’s “Incognito” mode offers a warning that websites can still track you; other browsers’ private browsing modes might not. And there is, I think, a reasonable argument that Google is being somewhat duplicitous by offering a browser mode that purportedly disguises a user’s identity while knowingly offering products and services that eliminate whatever protections Incognito Mode may offer. Must be nice to have a finger in every pie.

Still, though: five billion dollars in damages and an accusation of violating the Federal Wiretap Act, of all laws, seems rather silly.