Category: Technology

iPhone 7

Posted on by Paul Jones

There was a lot announced at Apple’s event today, and I’d like to offer this piece as a knee-jerk analysis of what was announced. Before I dig in, I’d like to note that this was the first Apple presentation that used San Francisco as the font, which I think is a great change.

AirPods

One of the most innovative products announced at Apple’s events today was not a phone, but an accessory which will conveniently upset users which suddenly find themselves without a headphone jack on their phone. Here’s how Apple introduces their new headphones:

Apple® today introduced AirPods™, innovative new wireless headphones that use advanced technology to reinvent how we listen to music, make phone calls, enjoy TV shows and movies, play games and interact with Siri®, providing a wireless audio experience not possible before.

Removal of headphone jack notwithstanding, I am excited to try out these AirPods. I’ve believed for a while now that Bluetooth wireless headphones have become “good enough” when compared to their wired counterparts. Admittedly, there are still problems, specifically the user experience around pairing, especially for multiple devices. While the battery life seems low and the price tag high when compared to similar products, the fit and finish of an Apple product seems present in this product. For instance, with regards to the user experience around pairing, when you pair your AirPods with your phone, that pairing is propagated across your Apple devices using iCloud, so you can use them with your other devices too. Also, you can use just one AirPod, perhaps as an earpiece, to be more inconspicuous, to use it more casually, or to wait while your other AirPod charges.

The bottom line is that I will get myself a pair of AirPods – I’ve wanted a gadget like this for some time, and Apple appears to have nailed the execution on Bluetooth earbuds.

iPhone

But what of the new iPhone? Here’s how Apple put it:

The new iPhone features new advanced camera systems that take pictures like never before, more power and performance with the best battery life ever in an iPhone, immersive stereo speakers, wide color system from camera to display, two new beautiful finishes, and is the first water and dust resistant iPhone.

What stands out to me about the iPhone updates is that Apple finally seems comfortable with iPhone updates being just that – updates. In the past, the marketing materials and surrounding press all seemed to expect and to be delivering another “breakout/breakthrough/revolutionary” product, where the iPhone 7 seems comfortable with being an all-things-considered total upgrade. The new “Black” is absolutely beautiful, I much prefer it to Space Gray. The stereo speakers, improved display, improved camera, improved processor, and improved battery are all great – Apple really delivered an excellent phone.

Of course, the most glaring change to the every day consumer isn’t even listed in the press release, and that’s the omission of the headphone jack. I’m not personally opposed to removal of the headphone jack, I’ve been using Bose QC 35s for some time now and with great results. However, if I made music on my iPhone and wasn’t able to use flat-response headphones (necessarily with a jack) while charging my device, I’d be pretty upset. The problem for music creators with wireless is latency – when you’re starting and stoping a lot, the delay between hitting play and hearing audio in wireless headphones, even if measurable in the 100s of milliseconds, is infuriating and probably insurmountable for the foreseeable future. Once you start using monitors which process the audio before sending it as output, you can just forget about using Bluetooth, you need a wire.

The way that Phil Schiller justified this change was principally “courage”, but ancillarily having more space for the battery, the 3.5mm jack being “old”, and wireless being the future. The space justification is interesting in that this device is not any thinner than the last iPhone, which included a 3.5mm jack, and also on grounds that I bet this changes makes its way into bigger devices like the iPad, where space isn’t so tight. The “old” justification is not so convincing – the use of pixels, the use of cellular networks, the idea of a CPU are all “old” but still somehow relevant and important. Schiller is right about wireless being the future however, which is the only way I can interpret the “courage” line as arrogant and tone-deaf. The exciting thing about this, to me, is that the market will decide. I imagine Apple has done their homework, and found that not enough people care about the 3.5mm jack to justify its continued existence. I would much prefer to see usage numbers rather than hear about hand-wavy “courage” to justify this change.

The bottom line is that I won’t be upgrading my iPhone 6 Plus to the iPhone 7, but there’s definitely never been a better time to get an iPhone if you’ve wanted one. If I were going for a iPhone, however, it’d be an iPhone 7 Plus in Black, because the increased screen size, battery, and better camera all make for a better phone that the smaller sibling. Like Stephen Hackett, I wouldn’t go for the jet black:

I really like the look of the jet black in photos, but between this note and photos of the matte black option, I’m going matte.

Apple Watch

Here’s Apple’s take on the updates to the Watch:

Apple Watch Series 2 is packed with incredible fitness and health capabilities including a water resistance 50 meter rating for swimming,*  and built-in GPS so users can now run without an iPhone®. Apple Watch Series 2 also features a dramatically brighter display and a powerful dual-core processor.

The grand irony here to me as an avid Apple Watch user is that across Apple’s entire product line, from their professional-grade desktops to their bottom-of-the-line smart phones, Apple are obsessed with thinness to the detriment of every other metric. Number of ports? Well, we better remove a few in favor of being thinner. Size of battery? Well, battery improvements mean it doesn’t have to be as big, so better make it thinner. And yet, in the one product where thinness really matters to me, on the device which I think stands the most to gain from shaving a couple centimeters, Apple adds more power. These updates to the watch are much needed – third party apps are very slow, I must admit I’ve found the display ever so slightly lacking (but no showstopper by any means), and the experience of having your phone and your watch while running definitely needed rectifying.

The bottom line is that I will not be upgrading my Series 1, but I greatly look forward to getting watchOS 3 on there.

 

AT&T, Apple, Google to work on ‘robocall’ crackdown

Posted on by Paul Jones

For a couple of different reasons, the frequency which I received automated telemarketing is increasing, and I find it quite annoying. The phone call used to be something casual, when I was a kid, I’d call people just to see what was going on with them. Because text communication and cell phones, this is no longer necessary, and in fact, I suspect most people find phone calls rather intrusive, what with the ringing and having to pause talking to everyone else. Which is why telemarketing is so annoying. Thankfully, Reuters:

The chief executive of AT&T (T.N) will announce Friday that 33 companies including the telecom giant, Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O) are joining an effort with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to crackdown on robocalls.

Despite these companies actually holding one another by the throat, these fierce rivals all agree: robocalls suck.

iOS and Android market share

Posted on by Paul Jones

The latest version of iOS is on 87% of devices, according to iDownloadBlog, in stark comparison to 15% of Android users being on the latest version of Android. You must consider, however, that Android has more users, where the latest official numbers indicate that iOS has 1 billion active users where Android has at least 1.4 billion active users. So for developers targeting customers, the latest and greatest iOS is on 870 million devices and the latest and greatest version of Android is on 210 million devices. When you also consider that iOS users spend 4X as much on platform, it really becomes difficult to justify starting a business on Android.

Twitter, ISIS, and free speech

Posted on by Paul Jones

The New York Times:

Twitter suspended 235,000 accounts that promoted terrorism over the last six months, as part of a continuing effort to keep people from using the social network for extremist causes, the company said Thursday.

This is completely okay despite being an affront to free speech because Twitter does not owe you (or ISIS) anything. Twitter’s interests are with their advertisers, and when the any speech goes against their motivations, it is completely up to Twitter to deal with it the way they want (and they will). It gives everyone at least one compelling reason not to centralize their speech and surrender their freedom, especially when hosting text is so cheap.

Apple wants to add cellular service to their Watch

Posted on by Paul Jones

The Verge:

Apple won’t be adding cellular connectivity to the Apple Watch this year, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The company had planned to incorporate the technology and uncouple the Apple Watch from the iPhone, but ran into issues related to battery life.

I wasn’t an early adopter of iOS, but I imagine the early days made it clear that the small screen of the original iPhone was good enough for many tasks typically reserved for a sit down computer and keyboard, and this expanded year over year as the device’s capabilities and functionality expanded. Just like WiFi and Bluetooth are good enough for most uses when compared with their wired alternatives, and this continues to expand as the technology becomes more capable. Regardless of whether this is true of the iPhone, I definitely find that the Watch is good enough for many tasks, namely switching songs, adjusting volume, short phone calls, and canned messages. With WatchOS 3 this expands somewhat, bringing the option to draw your letters to form messages, and in other ways. Perhaps the Watch has a relationship with iPhone, in Apple’s mind, the same way the original iPhone had a relationship with the Mac. To add to a polemic spin to this, if you look at Apple’s present Mac line-up, we all know how that went for the Mac.

Twitter rolling out quality filters

Posted on by Paul Jones

Twitter:

Last year we began testing a quality filter setting and we’re now rolling out a feature for everyone. When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience.

It seems to me that every Twitter user is really demanding on the free service, expecting it uphold principles of free speech and filter hate speech from their feeds and not get any money for doing it. Twitter is iconic, every commercial and celebrity is constantly peddling hashtags, and yet there’s no clear way forward for Twitter to profit on that.

The future is now, well, next month, and only in Pittsburgh

Posted on by Paul Jones

Bloomberg:

The plan seemed audacious, even reckless. And according to most analysts, true self-driving cars are years or decades away. Kalanick begs to differ. “We are going commercial,” he says in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “This can’t just be about science.” […] Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved.

Even given the various hedges, specifically that these cars still have drivers in them and that it’s a test program running only in Pittsburgh, this is huge news. I imagine there are various meetings going on right now at Apple, Google, Tesla, Ford, and more, where people are throwing their laptops. While there’s a lot of technological barriers to success still, the biggest hurdle, I’d argue, is still the hearts and minds of the people. I’ve heard many times that people think self-driving cars are cool, but “they wouldn’t want to beta test it” and “like to be able to control their vehicle.” This is a step in both advancing the technological front and changing the culture, all while being “first to market.”

We should expect responses from competitors.

The upcoming Apple products

Posted on by Paul Jones

Mark Gurman reporting for Bloomberg reveals (via Katie Floyd) that his sources indicate:

  • Dual camera lens on the Plus-sized iPhone;
  • A touch-sensitive home button which doesn’t “click”;
  • The removal of the headphone jack;
  • An industrial design similar to the iPhones from the last two years.

If these are all true, and everything else being equal, I will probably not upgrade my iPhone this year. I have a 6 Plus that’s still going really strong despite constant abuse in the form of not having a case, always using Bluetooth, using a lot of wireless hotspot, lots of graphics-intensive video games (Grand Theft Auto games, mostly), and other demanding uses. For photography I really care about, I tend to use my Nikon D5200, and the iPhone 6 Plus camera is good enough for casual snaps.

I’m ready to be really wowed by Apple’s new Mac offerings however. Also from Mark Gurman (via Michael Tsai via Hacker News):

The most significant addition to the new MacBook Pro is a secondary display above the keyboard that replaces the standard function key row. Instead of physical keys, a strip-like screen will present functions on an as-needed basis that fit the current task or application.

Apple’s learned a lot about how to make a great touch screen, but thought of replacing the power and escape buttons with software is not exactly what I had in mind with new Macs. I was hoping instead for top-of-the-line CPUs, GPUs, and higher default RAM and disk space. Perhaps the strip will have some Force Touch technology built into it that’ll give tactile feedback to those power users expecting to have a key there. I’m also uncertain of the light strip as a user experience considering that I do not look at the keyboard when using a computer, and arguably shouldn’t have to. This discussion does remind me of this classic XKCD:

workflow

The ad-block cold war

Posted on by Paul Jones

The web advertising industry is facing an existential threat: ad-blockers. The beauty of browsers is that, for the most part, web pages are still static files that you download and execute locally and safely. You can control everything very precisely, choosing to not download certain IPs, block whole file extensions, or a combination of these two the circumvent any advertisements. This is probably impossible to overcome. Additionally, the people that tend to be ad-block users tend to be future consumers of expensive things like cars, houses, investment products, razors, whatever. And this is only growing, here’s a chart demonstrating this from PageFair:

Screen Shot 2016-08-11 at 10.25.51 PM

And this is a pretty serious problem. Some of the most important businesses run on advertisements: search engines, journalism, random web utilities like JSON formatters, etc. Google is used by doctors, mechanics, programmers, almost every professional, to do their job better and faster. Yet people are increasingly saying no to Google’s business model.

This commentary comes on the heels of Facebook’s ongoing cat-and-mouse game with AdBlock Plus. Here’s TechCrunch’s report:

Adblock Plus launched a workaround to Facebook’s adblock bypass today that ham-handedly removes posts from friends and Pages, not just ads, according to a statement provided by Facebook to TechCrunch.

I think everyone here is at fault. Facebook is releasing thousands of lines of user-hostile source code, putting tremendous effort into continuing to go against their users wishes. Meanwhile, AdBlock Plus claims no moral high ground, as they’re not really protecting people from advertisements and tracking, their protecting users against the advertisements and tracking that doesn’t pay AdBlock Plus to be white-listed, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Eyeo GmbH, the company behind popular desktop ad-blocking tool Adblock Plus, now accepts payment from around 70 companies in exchange for letting their ads through its filter. Eyeo stipulates that they must comply with its “acceptable ads” policy, meaning their ads aren’t too disruptive or intrusive to users.

That is Facebook’s hard-earned money, but that doesn’t mean I’m either removing my ad-blocker or ecstatic to use Facebook’s product, rather just that the web advertising industry is morally bankrupt and soon to be actually bankrupt. And this is not a good thing for all of us who rely on actually important ad-supported businesses like the Wall Street Journal and Google. I implore you: if you find something that’s critical to your day-to-day life like software, information, or anything digital: find out how to pay them money so that your both on the same team. Today, doctors are using a product that’s funded in part by pharmaceutical companies showing ads to them. Journalists are paid by the same companies that are polluting the earth, building defective products, or other scandals that need to be investigated by journalists.

Which makes the inevitability of the demise of digital advertising on the web so scary and exciting.

Instagram adds Snapchat features

Posted on by Paul Jones

Something I’ve wanted to say for a long time but never found an opportunity is that the term “social media” doesn’t describe the phenomena well. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and co. are all distant forms of socialization and as “media” it’s quite difficult to hold Tweets or Stories in comparison with, say, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy or the 24 hour news cycle. The term “social media” is the cleaned up version for job titles and business plans. Networks is much better. With that introduction, consider this exposition of changes to Instagram from Caitlin McGarry of MacWorld:

Instagram carries a pressure that other social networks don’t. Every photo must be perfectly composed, your feed artfully curated, otherwise you won’t rack up double-digit likes. Quelle horreur! (But seriously, it’s depressing when only a couple followers like your carefully crafted image.) It’s not uncommon for people to use high-end photo-editing apps to add gloss to their images before sharing them to Instagram.

There’s a grand irony in Instagram, that is was created and to make sharing photos easy and painless, and now it’s become difficult (because of their new “Stories” feature) and “depressing” (her words). I encourage everyone to reconsider whether social media is worth the price, which of course isn’t monetary, but in submitting your intellectual property and becoming addicted to their social currency.

Alleged iPhone 7 leak has no headphone jack and a big camera

Posted on by Paul Jones

It’s a very grainy, short video, but MacRumors discovered a video purporting to display the iPhone 7. Here’s the big camera:Screen Shot 2016-07-19 at 7.36.36 PM

And here’s the lack of a headphone jack:

Screen Shot 2016-07-19 at 7.37.08 PM

This runs against the speculation that there’d be two camera sensors, however I imagine it is possible that this leak could be of the regular instead of the Plus size, which could be different.

This also suggests to me that if Apple do not ship with a headphone jack, they’ll ship with an in-the-box alternative. There’s no way consumers are going to be satisfied with a $700 device which doesn’t have headphones in the box. However, as a user of the tremendous Bose QC-35s, which are wireless and noise canceling, I can attest that Bluetooth is firmly “good enough” now, much like WiFi was when it achieved critical mass.

Allo goodbye – why you shouldn’t use Google’s new messenger app

Posted on by Paul Jones

At their respective yearly developer conferences, Apple and Google both announced changes to their messaging platforms that compete with Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. All of these services now have features like stickers, photo editing, wacky themes, zany message styles, and other fun features. Under this glossy veneer of oversized emoji lies some serious privacy considerations, however. The security risks of Messenger and Snapchat are well–documented, but given that Google have announced a new app, it warrants further investigation.

Consider that Google makes money when you engage with an advertisement. In order to increase their chances of you doing this they develop free services like Gmail and Search. They take this opportunity to serve you those targeted ads, but also to collect metrics on your behavior, which in turn improves targeting. I suspect that the reason that Allo is not encrypted by default is that Google is analyzing your messages to further build out a profile on you, determine what type of ads you’re likely to click on, and serve them to you from the highest bidder. This profile will include products your considering buying, health conditions you mention, plans you have for the future, and more. Google “knows” these facts about you and uses that knowledge to sell advertisements. This would not be possible if the messages were encrypted end-to-end, because only the sender and receiver would have the digital keys required to see the contents of the messages.

If it were the government or someone you knew that intercepted your communications to pry into your business or secrets, it’d be rightly called unwarranted surveillance or just plain creepy. Consider that the analog equivalent of this behavior may be, say, reading your post-office delivered mail, which is a federal crime finable of up to $5,000 and punishable up to 5 years in jail. The turn of phrase at the start of this paragraph, to “pry into the business or secrets of another”, is exactly the wording of federal law 18 U.S. Code § 1702, and yet it seems that this is exactly what technology companies have convinced their users to be complacent with. There will be some that respond to this with, “I have nothing to hide.” Perhaps this is the case for some that make this claim, but if asked, I doubt most people would allow anyone to download their search history in full, forward all of their emails to somebody, or have their recent text messages read aloud in a public place (even if it was done anonymously, I suspect). Further, the mere existence of an incognito mode in Allo admits that there are messages that users do not want to share with Google and be profiled for.

This is a concession, a compromise. It’s because Google, like Facebook, realizes that consumers are wising up about the importance of privacy, and they are attempting to appeal to them. But it’s not a compromise that you have to make considering competing end-to-end encrypted chat services like WhatsApp or iMessage. A much stronger rebuttal to my claim that Allo is surveillance and creepy is that Google’s server do not in fact store the chat logs (it does, however, “read” them). Among other reasons, storing these messages is a liability they must manage with law enforcement agencies (remember Apple vs. the FBI?). As evidence of this, here’s Dieter Bohn from the Verge interviewing Google executives on the launch of Allo:

[Messages sent with Allo] are read by Google’s servers, but Kay assures me that the data is stored “transiently,” which is to say that Google doesn’t keep your chat logs around to be subpoenaed. And Fulay adds that Google doesn’t assign identity to the chat logs on those servers even then.

On storing messages “transiently”, this is not re-assuring. To re-use the previous metaphor: it’s akin to someone reading all of your mail, storing copious notes on the contents, and referring to those notes later to take guesses at your future behavior. Considering that in that period of time the message are stored on Google’s servers, they are run through the world’s most sophisticated machine learning algorithms to glean information from them. The reason they don’t store them is not to protect your privacy, it’s because they’re finished harvesting information from the message. And with regards to Google “not assigning identity ” to messages, the process of “de-anonmyizing” data has been well-documented at MIT and the Universitè Catholique de Louvain. The way it works is cross-referencing “anonymous” data with publicly available or leaked information. Not only that, but the data isn’t much use to Google unless they can use it to target ads to individuals, which makes me skeptical of this claim. Perhaps Google today is secure, both from external hackers and internal leakers, but there’s no guarantee that this will always be the case. Quite the contrary, the recent purchase of LinkedIn by Microsoft and LinkedIn’s frequent leaks show that your data can end up in different hands than you anticipated (though the terms of service users “agreed” to allows it).

The trade-offs involved with using Google’s Allo messaging service are not worth the value they provide. In particular, Allo’s off-by-default end-to-end encryption policy makes it inconvenient to secure your conversations, Google’s motives to profit is opposed to their user’s best interests, and the engineering countermeasures to limit the scope of this are at least unknown, perhaps superficial, and definitely not required considering the competition. However, there are number of really great ideas in Allo that are very popular amongst users of trendier messenger apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger. (For the record, WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted by default, it doesn’t seem to like WeChat even uses over-the-wire encryption, and Facebook stores all of your messages.) If you’re an Android user, stick with another chat service that encrypts by default like WhatsApp or Signal. If you’re an iOS user, many of the features from Allo were announced to be coming to iMessage, which is encrypted end-to-end, in the Fall.

Spotify launch new radio stations

Posted on by Paul Jones

Music is an art, a commodity, a lifestyle, a business, and more recently, an app. People used to pay for physical media in a way they didn’t pay for digital music, probably because it doesn’t feel like you’re receiving “a thing” when you download a file. As an alternative, music businesses developed around streaming, either on-demand or as “radio” (programmatic content). The way this was monetized was with advertisements and paying to remove them. This was to the benefit of the companies that were first in music streaming to generate the large scale required to be very profitable, and to the detriment of content producers that couldn’t generate that scale. Up to this point, I understand completely, armed with the amazing power of hindsight. But when Apple announced Beats 1, I was stupefied. When we have all the music we want available for immediate play, why would anyone want to go back to the Byzantine distribution method of programmed radio?

Perhaps it’s a significant differentiator, however, because here’s Rich McCormick from the Verge:

Swedish streaming service Spotify is launching two new radio shows today, both of which feature musicians talking about the kind of music that they like listening to while they’re making their art. The first, AM/PM, will feature artists like electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre and Terry Hall of ska icons The Specials talking about the music they listen to in the mornings before work, and in the evenings after a day spent creating. The second, Secret Genius, speaks to the songwriters and producers behind major songs, and features the actually-pretty-well-known James Blake, among others.

Perhaps it will be clear in time, but I don’t know what the appeal of this is when we have all the music available (almost) all the time.

 

Safari 10 implements native browser extensions

Posted on by Paul Jones

Daniel Dilger, writing for Apple Insider, via Dave Mark:

On both macOS Sierra 10.12 and today’s El Capitan 10.11.5 (when Safari 10 is installed), Safari will support App Extensions built from a combination of JavaScript, CSS and native code written in Objective-C or Swift.

[…]

More importantly, the new App Extensions architecture enables developers to distribute Safari Extensions as part of their app through the App Store.

A clear trend in this year’s WWDC was the number of different extension points and distribution channels Apple is opening up: iMessage Apps, Maps extensions, Safari extensions, third-party Siri, to name just a few. The Safari Extensions, in particular, are a new approach to distributing browser plugins compared to both Chrome and Firefox, as you can write compiled code for them!

Apple discontinue the MacBook, then the Thunderbolt Display

Posted on by Paul Jones

On Monday, Apple discontinued the legacy MacBook Pro:

Apple Stores are beginning to remove the 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro from their showfloors, in what may be a sign the company is preparing to completely phase out the product with a spinning optical disc drive, AppleInsider discovered on Monday.

Now, they’ve discontinued the very underpowered Thunderbolt Display:

Apple today announced that it is discontinuing its Thunderbolt Display, the large external display many use to connect to MacBooks or other Macs for extra screen real estate. This is very likely to fuel speculation (which has been ongoing) that Apple will soon launch a 4K or 5K version of the display.

Both of these are excellent news for people that want new hardware! To be conservative, I’m calling new MacBooks and a 5K external display at least by September but potentially as early as late-July.

Obvious, low-tech, anti-spyware

Posted on by Paul Jones

A key feature of Orwell’s dystopia was the ever-present screens that can never be turned off and were also always recording. Wanting to turn the devices off was met with suspicion. I used to use a sticky note, but now I have a cute bit of swag I got from a meet up. It’s two pieces of plastic, one which slides to cover the camera, with two tiny adhesive strips to keep it comfortably in place. I cover the camera because I’ve occasionally been in front of my computer when I receive a FaceTime call, and my image pops up on the screen. Of course it’s not transmitted, but it’s unpleasant enough of an experience that it made me want to be in control of that. In recent news, Marc Zuckerberg was shown to have tape on his camera and microphone. John Gruber found a 2013 study that found you could hack the camera:

Marcus Thomas, former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, said in a recent story in The Washington Post that the FBI has been able to covertly activate a computer’s camera — without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording — for several years.

You should cover your cameras, because you have your privacy to lose and nothing to gain from having it exposed.

Removing the headphone jack

Posted on by Paul Jones

There’s a lot of buzz around the next iPhone not having a headphone jack. In particular, John Gruber responded to Nilay Patel’s arguments against removing the port:

Nilay Patel, “Taking the Headphone Jack Off Phones Is User-Hostile and Stupid”:

But just face facts: ditching the headphone jack on phones makes them worse, in extremely obvious ways. Let’s count them!

And let’s compare them to arguments against removing floppy drives from the iMac in 1998.

They both miss the mark, in my opinion. Replacing the headphone jack with another jack doesn’t significantly change user experience, it’s just another way of doing the same thing. In fact Nilay’s right, if it’s just a matter of replacing the jack, it’s kind of stupid.

What I find more interesting is this portion of the discussion:

2. Wireless headphones and speakers are fine, not great

Totally agree. But the rumor is that the new iPhone will ship with wired Lightning earbuds.

Getting rid of the headphone jack and shipping with great wireless headphones would significantly improve the experience. The biggest problem, as is often the case, is charging the headphones, although perhaps the iPhone could charge the headphones?

Perhaps this is one reason I’m not in charge of the next iPhone, but as the owner of Bose wireless headphones, I can tell you that charging your headphones is a small cost to pay for wireless convenience.

Apple’s unique political independence

Posted on by Paul Jones

Hayley Tsukayama from the Wall Street Journal makes the case that Apple is uniquely disposed to take political stances because, unlike Facebook and Google, people don’t look to Apple for neutral information, they buy Apple’s hardware:

Apple, however, is still largely a company that makes phones and the personal stuff that comes with them, rather than dealing in information. Although Apple is making inroads into the publishing business with Apple News, its platform doesn’t have nearly the reach of Facebook or Google — and therefore, people don’t look to it to be an arbiter of information in the same way. And so, despite the growing activism of Apple chief executive Tim Cook, there are still plenty of people who use iPhones and don’t agree with Apple’s stances on political issues.

Before we place Apple on a moral pedestal, be warned that doing business with any of the tech giants is a moral compromise. For instance, while Apple’s political independence and stance on privacy stem from their making hardware, so does their treatment of the makers of that hardware. This independence also grants them the ability to fight against paying corporate taxes.

Being principally a hardware manufacture is part of Apple’s independence in the political sphere and the public eye, but this produces the stronger reason of Apple’s not being incentivized to compromise their users. This is what I think is exceptional about Apple.

Twitter launches Engage

Posted on by Paul Jones

Anecdotally, I think Twitter may be the highest-profile company which makes zero dollars. Its logo sits right next to Facebook on nearly every piece of marketing, and yet Twitter is nowhere near its competitors with regards to profit margin. Today, they announced a new app, which John Vorhees describes for MacStories:

[…] Twitter is different things to different people. For some it’s a public forum for chatting with friends. For others, Twitter is a broadcast medium. For still others, Twitter is all about marketing. Engage is designed to help you maximize the reach of your tweets through analytics. If that’s not your thing, you may view the app as useless, but that doesn’t mean it should be dismissed out of hand.

It’s an excellent service and this app shows the tremendous engineering and product brainpower they have at Twitter. Ideologically, I dislike where this is going: I wish companies would devise business models which didn’t rely on surveillance. The terms “public forum” and “broadcast medium” make me think Twitter should be owned by the people, kept completely neutral, devoid of surveillance, and run at a loss paid for by a taxes. I don’t see a way forward for this approach however, and I don’t have any hope for Twitter convincing people to pay for the service, however much it ended up being to be sustainable (per Tweet? per Kb?).

Edit: Here’s John Gruber’s take:

Even with a verified account and a fair number of followers, I find this app almost totally useless. Anything you want to actually do, like respond to a tweet, it shoots you over to the official Twitter app. I fear for Twitter — they’re just spinning their wheels.

Exactly. I worry for Twitter. I wonder if this is a play at becoming indispensable to “influencers” in hope for charging them in the future. I struggle to see how this will make them money, even if it seems “kinda cool.” If Gruber’s take is shared amongst high-profile bloggers, this app may go the way of #Music.

WWDC Diary Day 1: Keynote, Platform SotU, and Design Awards

Posted on by Paul Jones

This is my first WWDC, and I’m impressed by how efficiently the 5000 person event runs. The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium comfortably hosted every executive, press person, and developer with room to spare. I got a great seat for the keynote, being right up at the front on the second level, and the sound, lighting, and presentation system made the event a pleasure to watch. Everything from the food to the WiFi to releasing the session and lab schedule to making the betas available appeared to happen effortlessly. I’m sure a lot of work went on behind the scenes to make this happen, which I’m grateful for.

Moving on to the content, this WWDC showcased Tim Cook’s Apple at its absolute best: all four of the category-defining products moved forward in titanic leaps. Before we dive into the software, there was no new hardware. This is a grand shame, but I understand why: WWDC is a software event (and Apple are going to refresh their whole Mac line with a press release very soon, right? Right? RIGHT?). In terms of the software, all of iOS, (the newly renamed) macOS, watchOS, and tvOS have many great new features, APIs, and opportunities for app developers.

Let’s go platform-by-platform.

watchOS 3

Glances are gone, long app start up time is gone, and the “Dock” takes advantage of these two changes. The idea here is that apps are now so fast to start that a multitasking tray with the live first screen of your app. Also, there is now a new input style called Scribbles which lets you “write” letters on the watch and it will translate them into letters. Additionally, there are now dedicated watchOS apps for Reminders and Find My Friends, an emergency feature called “SOS”, and Activity sharing.

The structural changes to the interaction model for watchOS is right on point: previously, if I wanted to check the weather, I could: look at the complication, open the glance, or open the app. Now, if the complication isn’t present or doesn’t have enough information, you tap what was previously the “friends” button to reveal the Dock, and you can immediately see new information, or go into the app if you need to interact with it.

The Scribble input method is a welcome change that I’ll need to use to see if it can be useful. If it’s fast and accurate enough for writing short messages without tiring my arm, I’ll be a fan and use it a lot. I don’t think I’ll use Activity sharing at all, in part because I don’t use the Watch for fitness as much as a notification management tool, so I don’t have much to add there. I’ll use Reminders, probably not Find My Friends, and hopefully not SOS.

tvOS 10

Now it’s possible to sign-in to your cable provider once, and all apps get access to that authentication now. In addition to allowing more streaming of previous shows and revealing all the apps provided by your cable deal, they’ve added more live streams. For those people that find the Apple TV interface too bright at night now have the option to turn the interface dark. There was some controversy when the Apple TV first came out that the Remote app didn’t work, which Apple quickly patched while promising a fuller experience, and have now shipped that full Siri Remote app. Finally, there are some improvements to Siri.

Perhaps Apple was hoping to supplant cable providers and so purposely didn’t ship single-sign-on on day one, but as a heavy user of Apple TV, it was by far the biggest pain point that every new app required getting my computer to get up and running. It wasn’t that big a deal, my roommates and I got pretty good at working together every time an app decided we had to authenticate again, but I certainly look forward to not doing that anymore. I also look forward to finding out what other apps are available through the cable service, it’s difficult to discover apps I can use today.

The new Remote app with accelerometer and Siri support is great. It means that any iPhone owner is now the owner of a fully featured remote for the tvOS games. The tone and style of the games on tvOS reminds me of the Wii – casual party games. I hope this catches on with users and the games become more fun, akin to Mario Party. Less casual games also have reason to be excited too, as you can now require that the player of your game have a standard game controller type too. This sacrifices some fragmentation to allow apps to be more varied and take best advantage of whatever hardware they need, and I think it’s a compromise worth making.

macOS 10.12 Sierra

The features that stood out to me about the newly renamed macOS were:

  • Unlock with an Apple Watch;
  • Apple Pay in Safari;
  • Picture-in-picture for videos;
  • Automatic syncing of desktop to iCloud;
  • Automatic syncing of clipboards across devices;
  • Storing unused files in iCloud to download on-demand;
  • Tabs everywhere;
  • and Siri!

It seems to me like macOS lives in the shadow of iOS: these features are great, but I’d argue more drastic improvements are needed. For instance, it didn’t make the keynote, but Apple are updating the filesystem from HFS+ to their new APFS, which is great news. To be fair, the Siri SDK and functionality is exactly the sort of improvement the Mac needs, but it does feel quite late, especially considering that it’s been on iOS so long, and that Cortana and Google Now have long since shipped. I dislike the automatic syncing and optimizing to iCloud features because I like having more direct control and access to my files, but I’m sure people will love those features (I do recommend keeping a separate hard drive and a backup instead, however). This release is a great start, but there is much more that needs to be done: updating OpenGL, modernizing AppKit (have you ever tried using NSTableView?). and making the hardware and software usable by professionals in virtual reality, video, and other fields.

iOS 10

This is a mammoth release for iOS. The biggest focus was in the Messages app, where you can now:

  • Send handwritten notes;
  • Add animations to your messages;
  • Add “likes” to messages;
  • Annotate images before sending them;
  • Attach stickers to messages or images;
  • Automatically replace words with emoji;
  • Download and create apps that run within iMessage.

Messages, more specifically iMessage, has become a platform that strives to compete directly with Facebook’s Messenger. I look forward to using this version of iMessage, and I’m curious about what is possible in iMessage apps. The one fatal downside today of iMessage as a platform is the single-platform-edness of it (Apple platforms). There were rumors that Apple was going to announce iMessage for Android, and there is precedent for something like that now with Apple Music for Android. However, I don’t think iMessage for Android will ever happen, because it’s not a service Apple makes money on and I think it keeps many people on iOS. However, long-term, I’d argue having a truly competitive messaging platform would be good for Apple. Consider that selling apps and services on a cross-platform iMessage would probably make more money long-term than keeping users captive and not having developer interest. This feature will be great for people who only know people with iPhones, but I can’t blame Apple for not expanding one of their most valuable apps to competitors’ products.

Other improvements include:

  • Creating extensions for selling stuff within the Maps app;
  • Improved traffic handling in Maps;
  • Search for stuff on the way during navigation in Maps;
  • A new Home app for controlling your connected home products;
  • Revamped Apple Music;
  • Raise your phone to wake up the OS;
  • Increased use of 3D Touch throughout the system;
  • Interactive notifications withs views;
  • Better predictions above the keyboard;
  • A redesigned news;
  • AI powered Photos improvements;
  • Apple Pay in Safari;

These are all magnificent improvements that users will love, I think Apple did a great job in all-around improving iOS. The iMessage improvements are topical, fun additions that will convince people to upgrade, and the OS-level improvements and new APIs are a welcome change for power users and developers.