Search Results for: "color"

Google’s Speculation on Apple’s Advertising Ambitions ⇥ businessinsider.com

Peter Kafka, Business Insider:

Titled “Operation Black Walnut,” the 2022 report appears to have been assembled by Google strategists to try to imagine what kind of ad business Apple might eventually build out one day.

Apple’s current ad business is mostly confined to selling ads on its App Store search results page. But the report’s authors speculate that Apple could eventually start selling ads that run on other people’s apps and eventually on the web via its Safari browser. It might eventually become a $30 billion business, they guesstimate.

The iPhone continues to be Apple’s big moneymaker but, right after it is a big bucket labelled “Services”. Some of that is thanks to monthly recurring charges for iCloud, media streaming, video games, news, and fitness stuff. That is what probably comes to mind when you head “Apple Services”. But there are a few more things in that bucket: AppleCare, payments, advertising, and the App Store. Those last two categories are looking less solid than they once did.

Included in “advertising” is the revenue sharing agreement between Apple and Google, which is probably going to take a $20 billion per year haircut. That is about 20% of Apple’s entire annual “Services” revenue, and 16% of its total profits for 2024. Also, regulators are chipping away at the company’s lock on its cut of in-app payments.

The Google document is speculative and external to Apple, so it does not represent Apple’s actual strategy. This is what Google, an advertising company, thinks Apple could do if it wanted to really commit to selling ads. Does losing its Google revenue share tip Apple’s hand? I sure hope not, but I am not the person trying to figure out whether to take a massive financial hit for users’ trust and enjoyment. If Apple has good taste, I hope it will make the right call.

Chrome and Competition

Michael Liedtke, Associated Press:

The proposed breakup floated in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice calls for sweeping punishments that would include a sale of Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and impose restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine.

[…]

Although regulators stopped short of demanding Google sell Android too, they asserted the judge should make it clear the company could still be required to divest its smartphone operating system if its oversight committee continues to see evidence of misconduct.

Casey Newton:

In addition to requiring that Chrome be divested, the proposal calls for several other major changes that would be enforced over a 10-year period. They include:

  • Blocking Google from making deals like the one it has with Apple to be its default search engine.

  • Requiring it to let device manufacturers show users a “choice screen” with multiple search engine options on it.

  • Licensing data about search queries, results, and what users click on to rivals.

  • Blocking Google from buying or investing in advertising or search companies, including makers of AI chatbots. (Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion into Anthropic last year.)

The full proposal (PDF) is a pretty easy read. One of the weirder ideas pitched by the Colorado side is to have Google “fund a nationwide advertising and education program” which may, among other things, “include reasonable, short-term incentive payments to users” who pick a non-Google search engine from the choice screen.

I am guessing that is not going to happen, and not just because “Plaintiff United States and its Co-Plaintiff States do not join in proposing these remedies”. In fact, much of this wish list seems unlikely to be part of the final judgement expected next summer — in part because it is extensive, in part because of politics, and also because it seems unrelated.

Deborah Mary Sophia, Akash Sriram, and Kenrick Cai, Reuters:

“DOJ will face substantial headwinds with this remedy,” because Chrome can run search engines other than Google, said Gus Hurwitz, senior fellow and academic director at University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. “Courts expect any remedy to have a causal connection to the underlying antitrust concern. Divesting Chrome does absolutely nothing to address this concern.”

I — an effectively random Canadian with no expertise in this and, so, you should take my perspective with appropriate caveats — disagree.

The objective of disentangling Chrome from Google’s ownership, according to the executive summary (PDF) produced by the Department of Justice, is to remove “a significant challenge to effectuate a remedy that aims to ‘unfetter [these] market[s] from anticompetitive conduct'”:

A successful remedy requires that Google: stop third-party payments that exclude rivals by advantaging Google and discouraging procompetitive partnerships that would offer entrants access to efficient and effective distribution; disclose data sufficient to level the scale-based playing field it has illegally slanted, including, at the outset, licensing syndicated search results that provide potential competitors a chance to offer greater innovation and more effective competition; and reduce Google’s ability to control incentives across the broader ecosystem via ownership and control of products and data complementary to search.

The DOJ’s theory of growth reinforcing quality and market dominance is sound, from what I understand, and Google does advantage Chrome in some key ways. Most directly related to this case is whether Chrome activity is connected to Google Search. Despite company executives explicitly denying using Chrome browsing data for ranking, a leak earlier this year confirmed Google does, indeed, consider Chrome views in its rankings.

There is also a setting labelled “Make searches and browsing better”, which automatically “sends URLs of the pages you visit” to Google for users of Chromium-based browsers. Google says this allows the company to “predict what sites you might visit next and to show you additional info about the page you’re visiting” which allows users to “browse faster because content is proactively loaded”.

There is a good question as to how much Google Search would be impacted if Google could not own Chrome or operate its own browser for five years, as the remedy proposes. How much weight these features have in Google’s ranking system is something only Google knows. And the DOJ does not propose that Google Search cannot be preloaded in browsers whatsoever. Many users would probably still select Google as their browser’s search engine, too. But Google Search does benefit from Google’s ownership of Chrome itself, so perhaps it is worth putting barriers between the two.

I do not think Chrome can exist as a standalone company. I also do not think it makes sense for another company to own it, since any of those big enough to do so either have their own browsers — Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge — or would have the potential to create new anticompetitive problems, like if it were acquired by Meta.

What if the solution looks more like prohibiting Google from uniquely leveraging Chrome to benefit its other products? I do not know how that could be written in legal terms, but it appears to me this is one of the DOJ’s goals for separating Chrome and Google.

Humane Is Trying to License Its Operating System, a Move It Swears Was the Strategy All Along ⇥ crazystupidtech.com

Om Malik, at his new Crazy Stupid Tech publication — which, according to its mission statement, is a compliment — interviewed Humane founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri about how things are going:

Lost in the barbs about the botched hardware was the fact that a new kind of operating system powered the AI Pin. It was clear that AI Pin wasn’t merely a hardware wrapper for ChatGPT; it was software developed for the oncoming AI future.

Sitting across from me, Chaudhri is sharing details about lessons learned and his company’s core product, CosmOS, the AI operating system. The company now plans to license the software to those interested in AI-powered devices.

There is a diagram in this article illustrating the difference between the architecture of a “traditional O.S.” and that of this “A.I. operating system”, and I think I understand it — but only kind of. The way I interpret Malik’s explanation is that it works almost like a mix of plugins and a sort of universal data layer.

The way this was demonstrated to Malik was as though it was a car’s operating system. Malik says it was “much more intelligent than, say, an Alexa device”, which might very well be true. But the skills which were demonstrated are nominally possible with assistants that already exist in smartphone operating systems, albeit in a way that sounds far less sophisticated than Humane is able to deliver. If you have a relatively recent car, you can plug in your phone and get very close to that capability today.

I am reminded of Jason Snell’s article from the week of the A.I. Pin’s launch, in which he pointed out “how much potential innovation is strangled by the presence of enormously powerful tech companies”. The hard part for Humane — whether pinned to your shirt or installed in your car’s dashboard — is that it wants you to maintain an entirely new digital space in a world of far bigger companies that want to keep you in their insular environments.

Malik:

Licensing an operating system can be a lucrative business. Microsoft’s Windows windfall is legendary. However, there are other less obvious examples. In 1998, I wrote about a company called Integrated Systems that made an OS for devices ranging from dishwashers to microwaves. In 2000, it merged with Wind River Systems, and their OS powered all these devices that are computers but don’t look like computers — washing machines, for example. Wind River is now owned by Intel.

Wind River was sold by Intel in 2018 to TPG, a private equity firm, nine years after buying it for $884 million. The financial terms of TPG’s purchase were not disclosed, which does not suggest Intel made a killing and kind of implies it lost money. Just four years and predictable layoffs later, it sold the company for $4.3 billion. This is not really a correction to Malik’s point; more of an addition.

Update: If the idea behind an A.I. operating system is that it can figure out just the right process for the current task, and Danny Gonzalez’s experience is anything to go by, count me out. No thank you.

Sorry Siri

If software is judged by the difference between what it is actually capable of compared to what it promises, Siri is unquestionably the worst built-in iOS application. I cannot think of any other application which comes preloaded with a new iPhone that so greatly underdelivers, and has for so long.

Siri is thirteen years old, and we all know the story: beneath the more natural language querying is a fairly standard command-and-control system. In those years, Apple has updated the scope of its knowledge and responses, but because the user interface is not primarily a visual one, its outer boundaries are fuzzy. It has limits, but a user cannot know what they are until they try something and it fails. Complaining about Siri is both trite and evergreen. Yes, Siri has sucked forever, but maybe this time will be different.

At WWDC this year, Apple announced Siri would get a whole new set of powers thanks to Apple Intelligence. Users could, Apple said, speak with more natural phrasing. It also said Siri would understand the user’s “personal context” — their unique set of apps, contacts, and communications. All of that sounds great, but I have been down this road before. Apple has often promised improvements to Siri that have not turned it into the compelling voice-activated digital assistant it is marketed to be.

I was not optimistic — and I am glad — because Siri in iOS 18.1 is still pretty poor, with a couple of exceptions: its new visual presentation is fantastic, and type-to-Siri is nice. It is unclear exactly how Siri is enhanced with Apple Intelligence — more on this later — but this version is exactly as frustrating as those before it, in all the same ways.

As a reminder, Apple says users can ask Siri…

  • …to text a contact by using only their first name.

  • …for directions to locations using the place name.

  • …to play music by artist, album, or song.

  • …to start and stop timers.

  • …to convert from one set of units to another.

  • …to translate from one language to another.

  • …about Apple’s product features and documentation, new in iOS 18.1.

  • …all kinds of other stuff.

It continues to do none of these things reliably or predictably. Even Craig Federighi, when he was asked by Joanna Stern, spoke of his pretty limited usage:

I’m opening my garage, I’m closing my garage, I’m turning on my lights.

All kinds of things, I’m sending messages, I’m setting timers.

I do not want to put too much weight on this single response, but these are weak examples. This is what he could think of off the top of his head? That is all? I get it; I do not use it for much, either. And, as Om Malik points out, even the global metrics Federighi cites in the same answer do not paint a picture of success.

So, a refresh, and I will start with something positive: its new visual interface. Instead of a floating orb, the entire display warps and colour-shifts before being surrounded by a glowing border, as though enveloped in a dense magical vapour. Depending on how you activate Siri, the glow will originate from a different spot: from the power button, if you press and hold it; or from the bottom of the display, if you say “Siri” or “Hey, Siri”.

You can also now invoke text-based Siri — perfect for times when you do not want to speak aloud — by double-tapping the home bar. There has long been an option to type to Siri, but it has not been surfaced this easily, and I like it.

That is kind of where the good news stops, at least in my testing. I have rarely had a problem with Siri’s ability to understand what I am saying — I have a flat, Canadian accent, and I can usually speak without pauses or repeating words. There are writers who are more capable of testing for improvements for people with disabilities.

No, the things which Siri has flubbed have always been, for me, in its actions. Some of those should be new in iOS 18.1, or at least newly refined, but it is hard to know which. While Siri looks entirely different in this release, it is unclear what new capabilities it possesses. The full release notes say it can understand spoken queries better, and it has product documentation, but it seems anything else will be coming in future updates. I know a feature Apple calls “onscreen awareness”, which can interpret what is displayed, is one of those. I also know some personal context features will be released later — Apple says a user “could ask, ‘When is Mom’s flight landing?’ and Siri will find the flight details” no matter how they were sent. This is all coming later and, presumably, some of it requires third-party developer buy-in.

But who reads and remembers the release notes? What we all see is a brand-new Siri, and what we hear about is Apple Intelligence. Surely there must be some improvements beyond being able to ask the Apple assistant about the company’s own products, right? Well, if there are, I struggled to find them. Here are the actual interactions I have had in beta versions of iOS 18.1 for each thing in the list above:

  • I asked Siri to text Ellis — not their real name — a contact I text regularly. It began a message to a different Ellis I have in my contacts, to whom I have not spoken in over ten years.

    Similarly, I asked it to text someone I have messaged on an ongoing basis for fifteen years. Their thread is pinned to the top of Messages. Before it would let me text them, it asked if I wanted it to send it to their phone number or their email address.

  • I was driving and I asked for directions to Walmart. Its first suggestion was farther away and opposite the direction I was already travelling.

  • I asked Siri to “play the new album from Better Lovers”, an artist I have in my library and an album that I recently listened to in Apple Music. No matter my enunciation, it responded by playing an album from the Backseat Lovers, a band I have never listened to.

    I asked Siri to play an album which contains a song of the same name. This is understandably ambiguous if I do not explicitly state “play the album” or “play the song“. However, instead of asking for clarification when there is a collision like this, it just rolls the dice. Sometimes it plays the album, sometimes the song. But I am an album listener more often than I am a song listener, and my interactions with Siri and Apple Music should reflect that.

  • Siri starts timers without issue. It is one of few things which behaves reliably. But when I asked it to “stop the timer”, it asked me to clarify “which one?” between one active timer and two already-stopped timers. It should just stop the sole active timer; why would I ask it to stop a stopped timer?

  • I asked Siri “how much does a quarter cup of butter weigh?” and it converts that to litres or — because my device is set to U.S. localization for the purposes of testing Apple Intelligence — gallons. Those are volumetric measurements, not weight-based. If I ask Siri “what is the weight of a quarter cup of butter?”, it searches the web. I have to explicitly say “convert one quarter cup of butter to grams”.

  • I asked Siri “what is puente in English?” and it informed me I needed to use the Translate app. Apparently, you can only translate from Siri’s language — English, in this case — to another language when using Siri. Translating from a different language cannot be done with Siri alone.

  • I rarely see the Priority Messages feature in Mail, so I asked Siri about it. I tried different ways to phrase my question, like “what is the Priority Messages feature in Mail?”, but it would not return any documentation about this feature.

Maybe I am using Siri wrong, or expecting too much. Perhaps all of this is a beta problem. But, aside from the last bullet, these are the kinds of things Apple has said Siri can do for over a decade, and it does not do so predictably or reliably. I have had similar or identical problems with Siri in non-beta versions of iOS. Today, while using the released version of iOS 18.1, I asked it if a nearby deli was open. It gave me the hours for a deli in Spokane — hundreds of kilometres away, and in a different country.

This all feels like it may be, perhaps, a side effect of treating an iPhone as an entire widget with a governed set of software add-ons. The quality of the voice assistant is just one of a number of factors to consider when buying a smartphone, and the predictably poor Siri is probably not going to be a deciding factor for many.

But the whole widget has its advantages — you can find plenty of people discussing those, and Apple’s many marketing pieces will dutifully recite them. Since its debut in 2011, Apple has rarely put Siri front-and-centre in its iPhone advertising campaigns, but it is doing just that with the iPhone 16. It is showcasing features which rely on whole-device control — features that, admittedly, will not be shipping for many months. But the message is there: Siri has a deep understanding of your world and can present just the right information for you. Yet, as I continue to find out, it does not do that for me. It does not know who I text in the first-party Messages app or what music I listen to in Apple Music.

Would Siri be such a festering scab if it had competitors within iOS? Thanks to an extremely permissive legal environment around the world in which businesses scoop up vast amounts of behavioural data to make it slightly easier to market laundry detergent and dropshipped widgets, there is a risk to granting this kind of access to some third-party product. But if there were policies to make that less worrisome, and if Apple permitted it, there would be more intense pressure to improve Siri — and, for that matter, all voice assistants tied to specific devices.

The rollout of Apple Intelligence is uncharacteristically piecemeal and messy. Apple did not promise a big Siri overhaul in this version of iOS 18.1. But by giving it a new design, Apple communicates something is different. It is not — at least, not yet. Maybe it will be one day. Nothing about Siri’s state over the past decade-plus gives me hope that it will, however. I have barely noticed improvements in the things Apple says it should do better in iOS 18.1, like preserving context and changing my mind mid-dictation.

Siri remains software I distrust. Like Federighi, I would struggle to list my usage beyond a handful of simple commands — timers, reminders, and the occasional message. Anything else, and it remains easier and more reliable to wash my hands if I am kneading pizza dough, or park the car if I am driving, and do things myself.

You Can Use Clean Up With a Clear Conscience ⇥ sixcolors.com

Joe Rosensteel, Six Colors:

The photographs you take are not courtroom evidence. They’re not historical documents. Well, they could be, but mostly they’re images to remember a moment or share that moment with other people. If someone rear-ended your car and you’re taking photos for the insurance company, then that is not the time to use Clean Up to get rid of people in the background, of course. Use common sense.

There are clearly ways that image editing tools can overreach. But Clean Up is one of the times when it is valid to compare its effects to those of Photoshop. It is, in fact, the lack of any retouching tools in Apple’s iOS Photos app which has been conspicuous. The difference between the tools available for years in third-party editing apps and Apple’s, though, is in its simplicity — you really do only need to circle an area to remove a distracting element, and it often works pretty well.

Regardless of whether Apple’s A.I. efforts are less advanced than those of its peers or if this is a deliberate decision, I hope we continue to see similar restraint. Image Playgrounds is not tasteful to my eyes, but at least none of it looks photorealistic.

Apple as Godzilla ⇥ youtube.com

I have to say, it is quite an odd thing to be listening to a podcast and hear one’s own name. This recently happened to me on the latest episode of “Upgrade”. It feels like I am about to be called to the principal’s office or something. But I was not.

Myke Hurley and Jason Snell discussed an article I wrote about the more granular control available to users in iOS 18 when apps request access to their contacts. (My piece is a response to a New York Times story; Snell also linked to both with some commentary.) Their chat centres Apple’s scale and influence. Even little decisions the company makes are capable of transforming entire industries.

Hurley raises an apt comparison to App Tracking Transparency, which is exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote my piece. I am similarly unsympathetic to corporate empires built on illicitly obtained data. If you cannot make money when users are given a choice to consent, your business model probably sucks. But I do think it is concerning how powerful both of the major players were in the aftermath of that announcement: Meta, for hoarding behavioural data on billions of people; and Apple, for its ability to give users options.

I see parallels to Google’s power over the web. The near-uniform layout and structure of webpages is thanks to Google’s specific suggestions for improving the likelihood of ranking higher. The main difference is Google’s suggestions are sort of optional; if a website’s owner does not care much about search traffic, they can do whatever they want. The prompts on iOS, on the other hand, are baked into the system.

As Snell says, these apps “have to make the case” for granting permission. I do not think that is such a bad thing, and I am amenable to their suggestion of Apple’s built-in apps being placed on a level playing field. I think a lot of this would be more predictable if privacy laws were stronger. A basic level of privacy protections should not be a competitive advantage, nor should users be required to navigate either unceasing permissions dialogs or terms of service agreements to understand the myriad ways their personal information is being exploited — because their personal information should not be exploited.

Microsoft Redesigns Its Illustrations ⇥ microsoft.design

Jay Tan and Alexis Copeland, of Microsoft:

Our studies showed that while our illustrations could be described as colorful, inclusive, and genial on a surface level, they were received within consumer culture as uninteresting and emotionless. The flat vectorized style that was once hugely popular across the industry was now communicating sub-optimally and potentially evoking ideas and themes that were misaligned with our company values.

To continue being relevant and create delightful customer experiences, we had to apply the lessons we were learning from our current illustrations and progress in tandem with Microsoft’s evolving brand and culture.

Without intending to be cruel to the two credited authors of Microsoft’s blog post, the language used is indicative of a pretty bleak design practice. Over a thousand words are used to say there is a new suite of illustrations which is more dimensional in a soft and trendy way, and based on a new palette of colours. There is some reasonable justification, too. But most of this feels like it was written by an MBA who once heard about the value of design thinking from a TED Talk.

Also, while there are plenty of visuals shown, there are only two examples of these icons in use — and only one of those feels beneficial to its context. This is true despite Microsoft insisting “illustrations were approached more as an afterthought” but is now “turning them into visuals that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also rich in meaning and emotion”.

Sebastiaan de With reacted to the embedded sizzle reel:

My theory is that the designers making all these slick marketing graphics are kept away from the people making the software at all costs. Armed guards are involved. Whatever happens, this joy and whimsy cannot touch the actual software.

This is a consistent problem with Microsoft’s concept videos and the reality of its products. I use a Windows 11 PC at work and it is fine — it is probably the nicest Windows has ever looked. But these concept videos give the system an unearned abundance of richness, texture, and visual interest. The actual system has vast swathes of off-greys, brittle buttons, and misaligned window elements. There are plenty of hard-to-read panels made of a material that looks simultaneously very thick, owing to the amount of background blur, yet entirely lacks any feeling of depth.

Apple is not innocent of this crime, either. Its MacOS Big Sur design video presents window elements and the Control Centre with a structure and crispness not actually present in the shipping version. Instead, we are treated to a sea of blur.

MacOS Sequoia Shipped With the Annoying Screen Recording Permissions Dialog ⇥ developer.apple.com

I was proved wrong after I speculated last month the new monthly permissions prompt for legacy screen recording might not be in the released build of MacOS Sequoia:

I think it is possible MacOS 15.0 ships without this dialog. In part, that is because its text — “requesting to bypass the system window picker” — is technical and abstruse, written with seemingly little care for average user comprehension. I also think that could be true because it is what happened last year with MacOS 14.0. […]

It turns out this prompt, awkward language and all, made it into the public release.

Andrew Cunningham, in his review for Ars Technica, thinks this is a good idea in isolation:

The recurring screen recording permissions request is especially justifiable — it’s good for macOS to check in periodically about this kind of potentially data-scraping app, so attackers or domestic abusers can’t just install one once, click through the initial permissions requests, and have access for as long as you have the computer.

However, he dislikes the cumulative “constant barrage of requests and notifications [which] is an element of confusion and fatigue and of users clicking through boxes just to make them go away”.

Jason Snell, of Six Colors, is also frustrated:

In the name of making the Mac a safer place to be, right now Apple’s also making it a worse place to be. This is not an acceptable trade-off. It’s incumbent on Apple to make the Mac safer without compromising usability.

Put bluntly, macOS Sequoia fails this test.

In the latest beta release of MacOS 15.1, Apple added a new device management key, forceBypassScreenCaptureAlert, to override the monthly permissions request. (Thanks to Josh Calvetti.) However, my understanding is this cannot be used by more general users; it is only for managed devices.

Update: Added more context to my summary of Cunningham’s position.

Six Colors Turns Ten ⇥ sixcolors.com

Congratulations to Jason Snell and Dan Moren for ten years of Six Colors. From its beginning as a result of a painful media layoff, it is wonderful to see its continued independent success. I have read it just about daily since its launch, and have quoted Snell, Moren, and other contributors more times than I can count. I must still actively remind myself not to put a “u” in the site’s name, though.

Third Circuit’s Section 230 TikTok Ruling ⇥ techdirt.com

Maryclaire Dale, Associated Press:

A U.S. appeals court revived on Tuesday a lawsuit filed by the mother of a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl who died attempting a viral challenge she allegedly saw on TikTok that dared people to choke themselves until they lost consciousness.

While federal law generally protects online publishers from liability for content posted by others, the court said TikTok could potentially be found liable for promoting the content or using an algorithm to steer it to children.

Notably, the “Blackout Challenge” or the “Choking Game” is one of few internet challenges for teenagers which is neither a media-boosted fiction nor relatively harmless. It has been circulating for decades, and was connected with 82 deaths in the United States alone between 1995–2007. Which, yes, is before TikTok or even social media as we know it today. Melissa Chan reported in a 2018 Time article that its origins go back to at least the 1930s.

Mike Masnick, of Techdirt, not only points out the extensive Section 230 precedent ignored by the Third Circuit in its decision, he also highlights the legal limits of publisher responsibility:

We have some caselaw on this kind of thing even outside of the internet context. In Winter v. GP Putnam’s Sons, it was found that the publisher of an encyclopedia of mushrooms was not liable for “mushroom enthusiasts who became severely ill from picking and eating mushrooms after relying on information” in the book. The information turned out to be wrong, but the court held that the publisher could not be held liable for those harms because it had no duty to carefully investigate each entry.

Matt Stoller, on the other hand, celebrates the Third Circuit’s ruling as an end to “big tech’s free ride on Section 230”:

Because TikTok’s “algorithm curates and recommends a tailored compilation of videos for a user’s FYP based on a variety of factors, including the user’s age and other demographics, online interactions, and other metadata,” it becomes TikTok’s own speech. And now TikTok has to answer for it in court. Basically, the court ruled that when a company is choosing what to show kids and elderly parents, and seeks to keep them addicted to sell more ads, they can’t pretend it’s everyone else’s fault when the inevitable horrible thing happens.

And that’s a huge rollback of Section 230.

On a legal level, both Masnick and Stoller agree the Third Circuit’s ruling creates a massive change in U.S. internet policy and, because of current structures, the world. But their interpretations of this are in vehement disagreement on whether this is a good thing. Masnick says it is not, and I am inclined to agree. Not only is there legal precedent on his side, there are plenty of very good reasons for why Section 230 is important to preserve more-or-less the way it has existed for decades.

However, it seems unethical for TikTok to have no culpability for how users’ dangerous posts are recommended, especially to children. Perhaps legal recourse is wrong in this case and others like it, yet it just feels wrong for this case to eventually — after appeals and escalation to, probably, the Supreme Court — be summarily dismissed on the grounds that corporations have little responsibility or care for automated recommendations. There is a real difference between teenagers spreading this challenge one-on-one for decades and teenagers broadcasting it — or, at least, there ought to be a difference.

MacOS Should Permit People to Take Risks

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Apple has changed its screen recording privacy prompt in the latest beta of macOS Sequoia. As we reported last week, Apple’s initial plan was to prompt users to grant screen recording permissions weekly.

In macOS Sequoia beta 6, however, Apple has adjusted this policy and will now prompt users on a monthly basis instead. macOS Sequoia will also no longer prompt you to approve screen recording permissions every time you reboot your Mac.

After I wrote about the earlier permissions prompt, I got an email from Adam Selby, who manages tens of thousands of Macs in an enterprise context. Selby wanted to help me understand the conditions which trigger this alert, and to give me some more context. The short version is that Apple’s new APIs allow clearer and more informed user control over screen recording to the detriment of certain types of application, and — speculation alert — it is possible this warning will not appear in the first versions of MacOS Sequoia shipped to users.

Here is an excerpt from the release notes for the MacOS 15.0 developer beta:

Applications utilizing deprecated APIs for content capture such as CGDisplayStream & CGWindowListCreateImage can trigger system alerts indicating they might be able to collect detailed information about the user. Developers need to migrate to ScreenCaptureKit and SCContentSharingPicker. (120910350)

It turns out the “and” in that last sentence is absolutely critical. In last year’s beta releases of MacOS 14, Apple began advising developers it would be deprecating CoreGraphics screenshot APIs, and that applications should migrate to ScreenCaptureKit. However, this warning was removed by the time MacOS 14.0 shipped to users, only for it to reappear in the beta versions of 14.4 released to developers earlier this year. Apple’s message was to get on board — and fast — with ScreenCaptureKit.

ScreenCaptureKit was only the first part of this migration for developers. The second part — returning to the all-important “and” from the 15.0 release notes — is SCContentSharingPicker. That is the selection window you may have seen if you have recently tried screen sharing with, say, FaceTime. It has two agreeable benefits: first, it is not yet another permissions dialog; second, it allows the user to know every time the screen is being recorded because they are actively granting access through a trusted system process.

This actually addresses some of the major complaints I have with the way Apple has built out its permissions infrastructure to date:

[…] Even if you believe dialog boxes are a helpful intervention, Apple’s own sea of prompts do not fulfil the Jobs criteria: they most often do not tell users specifically how their data will be used, and they either do not ask users every time or they cannot be turned off. They are just an occasional interruption to which you must either agree or find some part of an application is unusable.

Instead of the binary choices of either granting apps blanket access to record your screen or having no permissions dialog at all for what could be an abused feature, this picker gives users the control and knowledge over how an app may record their screen. This lacks a scary catch-all dialog in favour of ongoing consent. A user will know exactly when an app is recording their screen, and exactly what it is recording, because that permission is no longer something an app gets, but something given to it by this picker.

This makes sense for a lot of screen recording use cases — for example, if someone is making a demo video, or if they are showing their screen in an online meeting. But if someone is trying to remotely access a computer, there is a sort of Möbius strip of permissions where you need to be able to see the remote screen in order to grant access to be able to see the screen. The Persistent Content Capture entitlement is designed to fix that specific use case.

Even though I think this structure will work for most apps, most of the time, it will add considerable overhead for apps like xScope, which allows you to measure and sample anything you can see, or ScreenFloat — a past sponsor — which allows you to collect, edit, and annotate screenshots and screen recordings. To use these utilities and others like them, a user will need to select the entire screen from the window picking control every time they wish to use a particular tool. Something as simple as copying an onscreen colour is now a clunky task without, as far as I can tell, any workaround. That is basically by design: what good is it to have an always-granted permission when the permissions structure is predicated on ongoing consent? But it does mean these apps are about to become very cumbersome. Either you need to grant whole-screen access every time you invoke a tool (or launch the app), or you do so a month at a time — and there is no guarantee the latter grace period will stick around in future versions of MacOS.

I think it is possible MacOS 15.0 ships without this dialog. In part, that is because its text — “requesting to bypass the system window picker” — is technical and abstruse, written with seemingly little care for average user comprehension. I also think that could be true because it is what happened last year with MacOS 14.0. That is not to say it will be gone for good; Apple’s intention is very clear to me. But hopefully there will be some new APIs or entitlement granted to legitimately useful utility apps built around latent access to seeing the whole screen when a user commands. At the very least, users should be able to grant access indefinitely.

I do not think it is coincidental this Windows-like trajectory for MacOS has occurred as Apple tries to focus more on business customers. In an investor call last year, Tim Cook said Apple’s “enterprise business is growing”. In one earlier this month, he seemed to acknowledge it was a factor, saying the company “also know[s] the importance of security for our users and enterprises, so we continue to advance protections across our products” in the same breath as providing an update on the company’s Mac business. This is a vague comment and I am wary of reading too much into it, but it is notable to see the specific nod to Mac enterprise security this month. I hope this does not birth separate “Home” and “Professional” versions of MacOS.

Still, there should be a way for users to always accept the risks of their actions. I am confident in my own ability to choose which apps I run and how to use my own computer. For many people — maybe most — it makes sense to provide a layer of protection for possibly harmful actions. But there must also be a way to suppress these warnings. Apple ought to be doing better on both counts. As Michael Tsai writes, the existing privacy system “feels like it was designed, not to help the user understand what’s going on and communicate their preferences to the system, but to deflect responsibility”. The new screen recording picker feels like an honest attempt at restricting what third-party apps are able to do without the user’s knowledge, and without burdening users with an uninformative clickwrap agreement.

But, please, let me be riskier if I so choose. Allow me to let apps record the entire screen all the time, and open unsigned apps without going through System Settings. Give me the power to screw myself over, and then let me get out of it. One does not get better at cooking by avoiding tools that are sharp or hot. We all need protections from our own stupidity at times, but there should always be a way to bypass them.

Permissions Pollution

In response to Apple’s increasingly distrustful permissions prompts, it is worth thinking about what benefits this could provide. For example, apps can start out trustworthy and later become malicious through updates or ownership changes, and users should be reminded of the permissions they have afforded it. There is a recent example of this in Bartender. But I am not sure any of this is helped by yet another alert.

The approach seems to be informed by the Steve Jobs definition of privacy, as he described it at D8 in 2010:

Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for — in plain English, and repeatedly. That’s what it means.

I’m an optimist. I believe people are smart, and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask ’em. Ask ’em every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them, if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re gonna do with their data.

Some of the permissions dialogs thrown by Apple’s operating systems exist to preempt abuse, while others were added in response to specific scandals. The prompt for accessing your contacts, for example, was added after Path absorbed users’ lists.

The new weekly nag box for screen recording in the latest MacOS Sequoia is also conceivably a response to a specific incident. Early this year, the developer of Bartender sold the app to another developer without telling users. The app has long required screen recording permissions to function. It made some users understandably nervous about transferring that power, especially because the transition was done so quietly to a new shady owner.

I do not think this new prompt succeeds in helping users make an informed decision. There is no information in the dialog’s text informing you who the developer is, and if it has changed. It does not appear the text of the dialog can be customized for the developer to provide a reason. If this is thrown by an always-running app like Bartender, a user will either become panicked or begin passively accepting this annoyance.

The latter is now the default response state to a wide variety of alerts and cautions. Car alarms are ineffective. Hospitals and other medical facilities are filled with so many beeps staff become “desensitized”. People agree to cookie banners without a second of thought. Alert fatigue is a well-known phenomenon, such that it informed the Canadian response in the earliest days of the pandemic. Without more thoughtful consideration of how often and in what context to inform people of something, it is just pollution.

There is apparently an entitlement which Apple can grant, but it is undocumented. It is still the summer and this could all be described in more robust terms over the coming weeks. Yet it is alarming this prompt was introduced with so little disclosure.

I believe people are smart, too. But I do not believe they are fully aware of how their data is being collected and used, and none of these dialog boxes do a good job of explaining that. An app can ask to record your screen on a weekly basis, but the user is not told any more than that. It could ask for access to your contacts — perhaps that is only for local, one-time use, or the app could be sending a copy to the developer, and a user has no way of knowing which. A weather app could be asking for your location because you requested a local forecast, but it could also be reselling it. A Mac app can tell you to turn on full disk access for plausible reasons, but it could abuse that access later.

Perhaps the most informative dialog boxes are the cookie consent forms you see across the web. In their most comprehensive state, you can see which specific third-parties may receive your behavioural data, and they allow you to opt into or out of categories of data use. Yet nobody actually reads those cookie consents because they have too much information.

Of course, nobody expects dialog boxes to be a complete solution to our privacy and security woes. A user places some trust in each layer of the process: in App Review, if they downloaded software from the App Store; in built-in protections; in the design of the operating system itself; and in the developer. Even if you believe dialog boxes are a helpful intervention, Apple’s own sea of prompts do not fulfil the Jobs criteria: they most often do not tell users specifically how their data will be used, and they either do not ask users every time or they cannot be turned off. They are just an occasional interruption to which you must either agree or find some part of an application is unusable.

Users are not typically in a position to knowledgeably authorise these requests. They are not adequately informed, and it is poor policy to treat these as individualized problems.

Apple’s Permissions Features Are Out of Balance ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

Apple’s recent feature changes suggest a value system that’s wildly out of balance, preferring to warn (and control) users no matter how damaging it is to the overall user experience. Maybe the people in charge should be forced to sit down and watch that Apple ad that mocks Windows Vista. Vista’s security prompts existed for good reasons — but they were a user disaster. The Apple of that era knew it. I’d guess a lot of people inside today’s Apple know it, too — but they clearly are unable to win the arguments when it matters.

The first evidence of this relentless slog of permissions prompts occurred on iOS. Want to allow this app to use the camera? Tap allow. See your location? Tap allow. Access your contacts? Tap allow. Send you notifications? Tap allow. On and on it goes, sweeping up the Mac in this relentless offloading of responsibility onto users.

On some level, I get it. Our devices are all synced with one another, passing our identities and secret information between them constantly. We install new applications without thinking too much about what they could be doing in the background. We switch on automatic updates with similar indifference. (If you are somebody who does not do these things, please do not write. I know you are there; I respect you; you are one of few.)

But relentless user confirmation is not a good answer for privacy, security, or competition. It merely kicks the can down the road, and suggests users cannot be trusted, yet must bear all the responsibility for their choices.

Apple’s Growing ‘Services’ Revenue ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

Last quarter, Apple made about $22 billion in profit from products and $18 billion from Services. It’s the closest those two lines have ever come to each other.

This is what was buzzing in the back of my head as I was going over all the numbers on Thursday. We’re not quite there yet, but it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be a quarter in the next year or so in which Apple reports more total profit on Services than on products.

When that happens, is Apple still a products company? Or has it crossed some invisible line?

The most important thing Snell gets at in this article, I think, is that the “services” which likely generate the most revenue for Apple — the App Store, Apple Pay transactions, AppleCare, and the Google search deal — are all things which are tied specifically to its hardware. It sells subscriptions to its entertainment services elsewhere, for example, but they are probably not as valuable to the company as these four categories. It would be disappointing if Apple sees its hardware products increasingly as vehicles for recurring revenue.

European Commission Finds Apple Is in Breach of DMA Rules ⇥ ec.europa.eu

The European Commission:

Today, the European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that its App Store rules are in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), as they prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content.

The problems cited by the Commission are so far entirely related to in-app referrals for external purchases. The Commission additionally says it is looking into Apple’s terms for third-party app stores — including the Core Technology Fee — but that is not what these specific findings are about.

Jesper:

In the DMA, the ground rule is for sideloading apps to be allowed, and to only very minimally be reigned in under very specific conditions. Apple chose to take these conditions and lawyer them into “always, unless you pay us sums of money that are plainly prohibitive for most actors”. Apple knew the rules and understood the intent and chose to evade them, in order to retain additional income.

Separately, earlier this month — the weekend before WWDC, in fact — Apple rejected an emulator after holding it in review for two months.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

App Review has rejected a submission from the developers of UTM, a generic PC system emulator for iPhone and iPad.

The open source app was submitted to the store, given the recent rule change that allows retro game console emulators, like Delta or Folium. App Review rejected UTM, deciding that a “PC is not a console”. What is more surprising, is the fact that UTM says that Apple is also blocking the app from being listed in third-party app stores in the EU.

Michael Tsai compiled the many disapproving reactions to Apple’s decision, adding:

The bottom line for me is that Apple doesn’t want general-purpose emulators, it’s questionable whether the DMA lets it block them, and even siding with Apple on this it isn’t consistently applying its own rules.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

The whole point of the DMA is that Apple does not get to act as an arbitrary approver or disapprover of apps. If Apple can still reject or approve apps as it sees fit, what’s the point of the DMA in the first place?

The Commission continues:

In parallel, the Commission will continue undertaking preliminary investigative steps outside of the scope of the present investigation, in particular with respect to the checks and reviews put in place by Apple to validate apps and alternative app stores to be sideloaded.

Riley Testut:

When we first met with the EC a few months ago, we were asked repeatedly if we trusted Apple to be in charge of Notarization. We emphatically said yes.

However, it’s clear to us now that Apple is indeed using Notarization to not only delay our apps, but also to determine on a case-by-case basis how to undermine each release — such as by changing the App Store rules to allow them

If you are somebody who believes it is only fair to take someone at their word and assume good faith, I am right there with you. Even though Apple has a long history of capricious App Review processes, it was fair to consider its approach to the E.U. a begrudging but earnest attempt at compliance. Even E.U. Commissioner Margrethe Vestager did, telling CNBC she was “very surprised that we would have such suspicions of Apple being non-compliant”.

That is, however, a rather difficult position to maintain, given the growing evidence Apple seems determined to evade both the letter and spirit of this legislation. Perhaps there are legitimate security concerns in the UTM emulator. The burden of proof for that claim rests on Apple, however, and its ability to be a reliable narrator is sometimes questionable. Consider the possible conflicts of interest in App Tracking Transparency rules raised by German competition authorities.

Manton Reece:

When a company withholds a feature from the EU because of the DMA — Apple for AI, Meta today for the fediverse — they should document which sections of the DMA would potentially be violated. Let users fact-check whether there’s a real problem.

Agreed. This would allow people to understand what businesses see are the limitations of the DMA on the merits. Users may not be the best judge of whether a legal problem exists — especially since laws get interpreted and reinterpreted by different experts all the time — but any details would be better than a void filled with speculation.

Dark Mode App Icons ⇥ lmnt.me

Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines:

[Beginning in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18] People can customize the appearance of their app icons to be light, dark, or tinted. You can create your own variations to ensure that each one looks exactly the way you way you want. See Apple Design Resources for icon templates.

Design your dark and tinted icons to feel at home next to system app icons and widgets. You can preserve the color palette of your default icon, but be mindful that dark icons are more subdued, and tinted icons are even more so. A great app icon is visible, legible, and recognizable, even with a different tint and background.

Louie Mantia:

Apple’s announcement of “dark mode” icons has me thinking about how I would approach adapting “light mode” icons for dark mode. I grabbed 12 icons we made at Parakeet for our clients to illustrate some ways of going about it.

I appreciated this deep exploration of different techniques for adapting alternate icon appearances. Obviously, two days into the first preview build of a new operating system is not the best time to adjudicate its updates. But I think it is safe to say a quality app from a developer that cares about design will want to supply a specific dark mode icon instead of relying upon the system-generated one. Any icon with more detail than a glyph on a background will benefit.

Also, now that there are two distinct appearances, I also think it would be great if icons which are very dark also had lighter alternates, where appropriate.

The iPad Pro Reviews Are in, and You Already Know How This Goes ⇥ macstories.net

Samuel Axon, Ars Technica:

The new iPad Pro is a technical marvel, with one of the best screens I’ve ever seen, performance that few other machines can touch, and a new, thinner design that no one expected.

It’s a prime example of Apple flexing its engineering and design muscles for all to see. Since it marks the company’s first foray into OLED beyond the iPhone and the first time a new M-series chip has debuted on something other than a Mac, it comes across as a tech demo for where the company is headed beyond just tablets.

These are the opening paragraphs for this review and they read just as damning as is the entire article. Apple does not build a “tech demo”; it makes products. This iteration is, according to Axon, way faster and way nicer than the iPad Pro models it replaces. Yet all of this impressive hardware ought to be in service of a greater purpose. Other reviewers wrote basically the same.

Federico Viticci, MacStories:

I’m tired of hearing apologies that smell of Stockholm syndrome from iPad users who want to invalidate these opinions and claim that everything is perfect. I’m tired of seeing this cycle start over every two years, with fantastic iPad hardware and the usual (justified), “But it’s the software…” line at the end. I’m tired of feeling like my computer is a second-class citizen in Apple’s ecosystem. I’m tired of being told that iPads are perfectly fine if you use Final Cut and Logic, but if you don’t use those apps and ask for more desktop-class features, you’re a weirdo, and you should just get a Mac and shut up. And I’m tired of seeing the best computer Apple ever made not live up to its potential.

Viticci was not granted access to a review unit in time, but it hardly matters for reviewing the state of the operating system. Jason Snell did review the new iPad Pro and spoke with Viticci about it on “Upgrade”.

The way I see it is simple: Apple does not appear to treat the iPad seriously. It has not been a priority for the company. Five years ago, it forked the operating system to create iPadOS, which seemed like it would be a meaningful change. And you can certainly point to plenty of things the iPad has gained which are distinct from its iPhone sibling. But we are fourteen years into this platform, and there are still so many obvious gaping holes. Viticci mentions a bunch of really good ones, but I will add another: I cannot believe Photos cannot even display Smart Albums.

Every time I pick up my iPad, I need to charge it from a fully dead battery. Once I do, though, I remember how much I like using the thing. And then I run into some bizarre limitation — or, more often, a series of them — that makes me put it down and pick up my Mac. Like Viticci, I find that frustrating. I want to use my iPad.

The correct move here is for Apple to continue building out iPadOS like it cares about its software as much as it does its hardware. I have no incentive to buy a new one until Apple decides it wants to take iPad users seriously.

Apple Introduces M4 SoC in New iPad Pro Models ⇥ apple.com

Kudos to Mark Gurman — Apple really did introduce the M4 SoC in the new iPad Pro models. The M4 comes just six months after Apple launched the M3, which is currently used in half the Mac lineup. The other half — the Mac Mini, the Mac Studio, and the Mac Pro — all use processors in the M2 family. Two of those models were only just launched at WWDC last year.

None of this makes sense to anybody outside of Apple. Perhaps it is not supposed to: any given processor is perhaps good enough that you do not need to worry. But Apple itself set up this comparison when it decided to use the same processors in iPads and Macs, and name them to clearly show which ones are newer. I am sure there are legitimate and plentiful performance improvements in each generation of new processors but it is a dizzying set of choices from a buyer’s perspective. Maybe there will be updates to the three Mac desktops at WWDC this year.

Update: Jason Snell, Six Colors:

Why the M4 now? It mostly has to do with Apple shifting chip production at TSMC (the company that fabs Apple’s chips) from the first-generation 3nm process to a new, more efficient second-generation 3nm process. There’s a whole backstory about TSMC’s change in 3nm processes that’s not worth getting into here, but suffice it to say that the first-generation process is largely a dead end, and the company is moving to a new set of 3nm processes.

That is the kind of backstory I would be interested in. However, as I wrote above, this is the kind of explanation which is logical for Apple but produces a confusing result for the rest of us.

Apple Modifies Terms of Core Technology Fee With More Exceptions ⇥ developer.apple.com

Apple:

[…] Today, we’re introducing two additional conditions in which the CTF is not required:

  • First, no CTF is required if a developer has no revenue whatsoever. […]

  • Second, small developers (less than €10 million in global annual business revenue*) that adopt the alternative business terms receive a 3-year free on-ramp to the CTF to help them create innovative apps and rapidly grow their business. […]

Two fundamental issues remain with the Core Technology Fee — namely, that developers still need to pay Apple even if their app is distributed exclusively outside the App Store and in-app payments are handled by a third-party processor, and the fee is an unknown and surprising future charge. One marvels at how the Mac could remain such a successful developer platform for so long without the support of a per-install fee.

But I was wrong. This is a meaningful relaxation of terms for entirely free apps, like the young developer example raised by Riley Testut during the March DMA compliance workshop.

The Humanity Of It

The new A.I. Pin from Humane is, according to those who have used one, bad. Even if you accept the premise of wearing a smart speaker and use it to do a bunch of the stuff for which you used to rely on your phone, it is not good at those things — again, according to those who have used one, and I have not. Why is it apparently controversial to say that with intention?

Cherlynn Low, of Engadget, “cannot recommend anyone spend this much money for the one or two things it does adequately”. David Pierce, of the Verge, says it is “so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways”. Arun Maini said the “total amount of effort required to perform any given action is just higher with the Pin”. Raymond Wong, of Inverse, wrote the most optimistic review of all those I saw but, after needing a factory reset of his review unit and then a wind gust blowing it off his shirt, it sounds like he is only convinced by the prospect of future versions, not the “textbook […] first-generation product” he is actually using.

It was Marques Brownlee’s blunt review title — “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed… For Now” — which caught the attention of a moderately popular Twitter user. The review itself was more like Wong’s, seeing some promise in the concept while dismissing this implementation, but the tweet itself courted controversy. Is the role of a reviewer to be kind to businesses even if their products suck, or is it to be honest?

I do not think it makes sense to dwell on an individual tweet. What is more interesting to me is how generous all of the reviewers have been so far, even while reaching such bleak conclusions. Despite having a list of cons including “unreliable”, and “slow”, and Low saying she burned herself “several times” because it was so hot, Engadget still gave it a score of 50 out of 100. The Verge gave it a 4 out of 10, and compared the product’s reception to that of the “dumpster fire” Nexus Q of 2012, which it gave a score of 5 out of 10.

That last review is a relevant historic artifact. The Nexus Q was a $300 audio and video receiver which users would, in theory, connect to a television or a Hi-Fi speaker system. It was controlled through software on an Android phone, and its standout feature was collaborative playlists. But the Verge found it had “connectivity problems” with different phones and different Nexus Q review units, videos looked “noticeably poor”, it was under-featured, and different friends adding music to the playback queue worked badly. Aside from the pretty hardware, there simply was no there there, and it was canned before a wide release.

But that was from Google, an established global corporation. Humane may have plenty of ex-Apple staff and lots of venture capital money, but it is still a new company. I have no problem grading on a reasonable curve. But how in the world is the Humane getting 40% or 50% of a perfect grade when every reviewer seems to think this product is bad and advises people not to buy one?

Even so, all of them seem compelled to give it the kind of tepid score you would expect for something that is flawed, but not a disaster. Some of the problems do not seem to be a direct fault of Humane; they are a consequence of the technological order. But that does not justify spending $700 plus a $24 per month subscription which you will need to keep paying in perpetuity to prevent your A.I. Pin from becoming a fridge magnet.

Maybe this is just a problem with trying to assign numerical scores. I have repeatedly complained about this because I think it gives mixed messages. What people need to know is whether something is worth buying, which consists of two factors: whether it addresses an actual problem, and whether it is effective at solving that problem. It appears the answer to the first is “maybe”, and the answer to the second is “hell no”. It does not matter how nice the hardware may be, or how interesting the laser projecting screen is. It apparently burns you while you barely use it.

In that light, giving this product an even tepid score is misleading. It is not respectful of potential buyers nor of the team which helped make it. It seems there are many smart people at Humane who thought they had a very good idea, and many people were intrigued. If a reviewer’s experience was poor, it is not cruel for them to be honest and say that it is, in a word, bad.