Category: Technology

Independent podcasting

Posted on by Paul Jones

Podcasting is the new radio, where the convenience of “listen to it on your own time” and “find exactly what you want to hear” beat out “listen to it live”. From my experience, the demand for podcasts far outweighs the supply, and it’s an ample time to get into podcast publishing. The beautiful thing about podcasting today is that if you do want to do it, it’s easy. Create a WordPress or Squarespace, get the template you want, and record with whatever microphone you probably have, like on your phone or laptop. The reason it’s this easy is that while the largest aggregator of podcasts, Apple, does approve being listed in their Podcast app, Podcasts are just RSS feeds, an open standard. But as the big producers of podcasters want to make more money, they have demands of the platform. Here’s the New York Times:

Interviews with over two dozen podcasters and people inside Apple reveal a variety of complaints. The podcasters say that they are relegated to wooing a single Apple employee for the best promotion. That sharing on social media is cumbersome. And that for podcasters to make money, they need more information about their listeners, and Apple is in a unique position to provide it. The problems, they say, could even open up an opportunity for a competitor.

I’m not convinced these were the reasons given to Apple in that meeting, because frankly I think they’re weak, but let’s take this point-by-point:

  1. That podcasts “are relegated to wooing a single Apple employee for the best promotion” is wrong because that’s what you need to do to get publicity in Apple’s podcast store, but I’d argue that you’d be better off publicizing your podcast using other channels, namely the web. Rather, I think improving the positioning options available to publishers will probably benefit big players to the detriment of indie publishers, and so I think it’s a net loss for the platform.
  2. “That sharing on social media is cumbersome.” Yes, it is, arguably because sharing on social media is just another platform to lock yourself into. But even if you deem sharing on social media is a good thing to do, which I very much doubt, podcasts are still an open enough standard that you can create a link which has timestamp information on it and takes a user straight to the content you want them to see, no middle man, and go get your podcast if they like what they hear.
  3. That “they need more information about their listeners”. Users are smart. They know they’re being spied on. They see that they search for a spork on Amazon 3 years ago, have been flagged as being a user that’s interested in alternative-dining options, and that you’ve continued to programmatically serve them ads across websites. They don’t like it. To bring programatic, unskippable ads to podcasts would be more damaging than lucrative, and so I would implore publishers to find alternative business models, namely sponsorship.

Marco Arment made a similar case:

Big podcasters also apparently want Apple to insert itself as a financial intermediary to allow payment for podcasts within Apple’s app. We’ve seen how that goes. Trust me, podcasters, you don’t want that.

It would not only add rules, restrictions, delays, and big commissions, but it would increase Apple’s dominant role in podcasts, push out diversity, give Apple far more control than before, and potentially destroy one of the web’s last open media ecosystems.

Remember I was talking about how you can just fire up an WordPress instance and get to podcast publishing? If it was more of a “platform”, we’d see the same problem’s that the App Store is struggling with: that the top 1% of the podcasts earn 99% of the profit. The reason for this is that big publishers would be better equipped to negotiate with Apple or whoever the platform owner is. It may be harder to earn a buck in today’s podcast ecosystem, but I am convinced that it’s better than centralizing control.

Federico Viticci gives his two cents for MacStories:

The great thing about the free and decentralized web is that the aforementioned web platforms are optional and they’re alternatives to an existing open field where independent makers can do whatever they want. I can own my content, offer my RSS feed to anyone, and resist the temptation of slowing down my website with 10 different JavaScript plugins to monitor what my users do. No one is forcing me to agree to the terms of a platform.

I understand why the web tends towards centralization today: owning and running a server is a naturally centralized relationship, especially considering that the knowledge has yet to disseminate to everyone. That won’t last forever, I am convinced that one day the barrier for entry for running your own server will be so low and the dissemination of technical knowledge will be so great that these arguments will become obsolete.

In the mean time I plan on complaining as loud as I can in order to defend indie producers.

Apple Music in iOS 9.3

Posted on by Paul Jones

Apple are publicizing their new APIs for Apple Music in iOS 9.3:

Provide controls for Apple Music within your app. iOS 9.3 now supports playback of any song for Apple Music members.

This is a good move, because controlling and managing music is so personal to people. For instance, listeners of classical music (I’m told) don’t necessarily prefer “artist” to be the top level entity, instead preferring the performer. This is an opportunity for 3rd party app developers to get in on the success of Apple’s music streaming service by filling niches that Apple are struggling to cater to with the one-size-fits-all Music app.

“Could children one day sue parents for posting baby pics on Facebook?”

Posted on by Paul Jones

I find myself both envious of the technology that children grow up with these days and contradictorily thankful that my childhood wasn’t as public as it might’ve been today. Furthermore, I find it oddly uncomfortable and saddening to see how infants react to being filmed with a smartphone, because their eyes immediately fix on the camera, like they know it’s important but they’re not sure why. On that note, France has created a precedent which would allow babies to sue their parents for violations of privacy:

That photo of your toddler running around in a nappy or having a temper tantrum? Think before you post it on Facebook. That’s the advice from French authorities, which have warned parents in France they could face fines of up to €45,000 (£35,000) and a year in prison for publishing intimate photos of their children on social media without permission, as part of the country’s strict privacy laws.

Can children or infants consent to being recorded? Are parents responsible for managing their child’s privacy? What’s the harm in posting your baby pictures for your baby? I’d argue that most infants don’t understand privacy, that in fact the consent does fall upon the parents to manage (for better or worse), and that the harm is that before your child comes to the age of consent, they have already irrevocably lost a part of their privacy. In a way, it’s akin to smoking around your child, became through no fault of the child, little parts of their well-being are gone forever. Of course, people will disagree, especially considering that those pictures likely bring great pleasure to social-media-savvy grandparents.

“Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously.”

Posted on by Paul Jones

As I’ve said, I use Apple Music because it’s convenient, it’s baked into my iPhone, and it’s a good value considering how much I use it (the conjunction of these points amounts to, essentially, laziness). The reason I bring it up is this via Marco Arment:

This Apple Music horror story is making the rounds today. It sounds like either a severe user error or a severe bug, and there’s no way to know which it is, but regardless, this aside is good advice:

For about ten years, I’ve been warning people, “Hang onto your media. One day, you won’t buy a movie. You’ll buy the right to watch a movie, and that movie will be served to you. If the companies serving the movie don’t want you to see it, or they want to change something, they will have the power to do so. They can alter history, and they can make you keep paying for things that you formerly could have bought. Information will be a utility rather than a possession. Even information that you yourself have created will require unending, recurring payments just to access.”

Own your data.

I keep my personal media, like rare MP3s I found of my favorite bands, demos my friends have given me, and songs I’ve made, completely separate from iTunes, and you should too. This is closely related the point that Apple is your biggest dependency (and that’s usually fine). It didn’t used to be this way, when I could trust iTunes and it’s simple filesystem storage, but when I signed up for iTunes Match, that got really complicated and so I moved those files.

For related reading, here’s Richard Stallman’s “The Right to Read”, which will make you either paranoid or scoff.

App Store search is currently broken

Posted on by Paul Jones

The App Store search results are behaving strangely, specifically, a search for “Spotify” yields “SoundCloud” (and others that aren’t Spotify) and a search for many smaller apps yields nothing. I take this as an accidental early roll-out of pay-to-play search, perhaps. Here’s Craig Grannel‘s take:

All this makes me think is that, once again, the App Store needs a serious kicking. But also Apple needs to do a bit more stealing. I might grumble about Android and that Google Play is mostly full of garbage, but at least when I find something I want to install on my Android devices, I can do so from the web.

I agree that the the App Store needs a serious kicking, but I’m not sure that being able to install remotely would be enough. This search bug is unfortunately timed, because discovery is by far the most lacking component of the App Store. I don’t have a proposal for how to improve discoverability when there are so many apps, but given Phil Schiller is now heading things up at the App Store, I’m hopeful they’ll be an announcement at WWDC.

This reminds me of a fact I learned at an iOS meet up that deserve repeating: as app developers, Apple is our biggest dependency. Mostly this deal works out great: Apple take 30% and the hardware profit to promote and sustain the marketplace for 3rd party apps. But Apple is still a dependency, and this isn’t the App Store’s first year, it’s not Apple’s job to promote 3rd party apps, it’s your job as a publisher. If you don’t like that, there are other platforms.

Update: iMore have a hilarious addendum to this story:

It also seems as though the problem is impacting the Mac App Store as well, with Apple’s Xcode missing from search results.

Windows 10 updates are now ruining pro-gaming streams

Posted on by Paul Jones

One day a few weeks ago, my roommate and I were hanging out, watching a video on his computer or something or another. All of a sudden, he starts complaining that his OS had chosen to automatically update his computer. Having read on the blogosphere that Windows was getting more aggressive about its update flows, I told him other people were experience it as well. It’s been getting worse, apparently:

After deciding to try and ruin advertise during the weather by attempting to automatically install midway through a forecast, Windows 10 is starting to wreak havoc with gamers. Ex-professional Counter Strike player turned full-time streamer Erik Flom was rudely interrupted mid-game and live on Twitch by Windows 10 automatically installing on his PC.

This is a huge PR problem that Microsoft absolutely deserve for this behavior. Pro-gamers make their living by streaming, making these upgrade policies costly embarrassments. The core problem that not even Mac users are immune to is that we use software that we don’t, and very often can’t, fully understand, even as a community. I mean this in the sense that these operating systems are closed source, and sometimes they have malicious behaviors like this one. If the code was at least available for auditing or was fully open-source, experts in the community could decry malicious behavior.

I’m not an open-source stalwart, in part because of what I interpret as necessity, but I’m definitely an open-source evangelist. When you can, use GNU/Linux.

Apple Music rumored for a big reboot

Posted on by Paul Jones

I’ve had two experiences recently with Apple Music that are worth sharing:

  1. I’ve been cutting costs and minding the pennies, just out of good practice, and of my discretionary spending, a small portion goes to Apple. Specifically, iCloud Backup and Apple Music. It’s not quite enough money that I’m considering cutting the services, but it’s just enough money to make me consider if I can do without;
  2. I recently borrowed a friends’ phone to find a song, instinctively opened Apple Music, only to find they didn’t pay for the service, and so I couldn’t play any music. I felt silly and deflated, I’ve just grown so accustomed to having all of the worlds’ music all of the time that it was a minor shock to suddenly not have that available.

Considering this, I was interested to learn from the Verge that:

Apple is planning to overhaul its Apple Music service to make it “more intuitive to use,” according to Bloomberg News. Citing sources, Bloomberg News claims Apple will also better integrate its streaming and download options, and expand its radio service. Apple is rumored to unveil its updated Apple Music service at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June.

I don’t have a lot to complain about with Apple Music other than “the small things.” It’s confusing to not know which song is local and which song is “in the cloud”, sometimes songs won’t play, sometimes things are duplicated. What I do have a lot to say about is the broader UX of music on Apple’s platforms, specifically the monolith that iTunes has become.

Parties for WWDC

Posted on by Paul Jones

Parties for WWDC is an aggregator of developers parties happening in San Francisco mostly exclusively for participators of WWDC 2016.

There’s an app to show you all the stuff that goes on during WWDC. I haven’t mentioned it here, but I’m pleased to say this will be a great resource for when I’m attending WWDC this year! Via Ben Collier.

If your smartwatch is slow, they blew it

Posted on by Paul Jones

Nilay Patel:

[The Apple Watch] was slow when it was first announced, it was slow when it came out, and it stayed slow when Watch OS 2.0 arrived. When I reviewed it last year, the slowness was so immediately annoying that I got on the phone with Apple to double check their performance expectations before making “it’s kind of slow” the opening of the review.

Apps are slow, and have been slow since Watch OS first launched. I’m very critical of Apple’s strategy of “the future of everything is apps” approach to the Watch and the TV: the best parts of the Apple Watch and the Apple TV are, in my opinion, not yet the “apps”:

  1. The Apple Watch’s complications and glances are terrific, they’re fast, up-to-date, and are quicker than my iPhone, and so they’re used. Namely, Fantastical’s calendar complication and Dark Sky’s weather complication are tremendous. The apps are slow, difficult to find, and require me to keep my wrist 90 degrees from my face for too long.
  2. The Apple TV’s greatest features are that I can ask Siri for anything and I’m taken directly to the content, I don’t care what bin it’s in or what service it’s sourced from, just do what a TV is supposed to and play the thing. Having said that, I’ve had a lot of fun with Flappy Bird but it’s no Grand Theft Auto 5, to be a little unfair.

John Gruber makes a similar point:

The things on Apple Watch that people actually like and use are the things that aren’t slow (notifications, activity tracking and goals, Apple Pay, complications, maybe Glances) and the things that are slow are the things people don’t use (apps, especially). Apple should have either cut the slow features from the original product, or waited to launch the product until all the features were fast.

I’m curious to see how apps play out with the release of the next Watch, whenever that is. Specifically, will we see the ability for third party developers to do more with what has been proven to be good, or will apps somehow be made better? It’s going to be a great WWDC!

Apple’s pitch and under-promising and over-delivering

Posted on by Paul Jones

Here’s John Gruber commenting on Shira Ovide’s piece in Bloomberg:

Shira Ovide, writing for Bloomberg:

Here’s what Cook didn’t say: 1) Apple has been misjudging its own business, and that makes it tough to believe what executives say; and 2) The company failed to prepare investors for an inevitable slowdown in growth — even if that slowdown proves temporary. If one duty of public company executives is to under-promise and over-deliver, Apple has flopped in that job.

This is fair and astute criticism of Cook and Apple’s executive team. The problem isn’t the drop in iPhone sales so much as forecasting them accurately.

  1. Apple’s guidance has been right, almost hitting directly in the middle, quarter after quarter;
  2. Since the iPhone, Apple’s brand is predicated on record numbers and staggering innovation: neither Wall Street nor the blogosphere would have been satisfied with “don’t get excited about this quarter” messaging, and that’s quite the catch-22.

Giphy launches ‘Giphy Keys’

Posted on by Paul Jones

There are animated GIFs that makes me laugh every damn time, for instance search for “banana monkey cat” and prepare to have tears stream down your face. However, something that makes me laugh is that Giphy, a search engine for GIFs, has raised $78.95M in 3 Rounds from 8 Investors. Today, Giphy have launched an iOS keyboard:

Giphy today launched its own iOS keyboard, called Giphy Keys, that will let users search for and send GIFs without having to navigate to a separate keyboard application. Once users install Giphy Keys as a new keyboard in settings — and allow it full access — the app can be selected as a keyboard by tapping the globe icon whenever the keyboard is open on iOS.

I have nothing against GIFs or Giphy, but I do find this kind of incredible. There’s just so much money going to something that I can’t tell how to monetize other than “animated GIF ads”, which sound horrible. Never mind the technical problems with GIFs themselves, like only supporting 256 colors, quickly ballooning in size when converting from more reasonable video formats, and transparency problems. Finally,  the problem that would keep me up at night if I ran Giphy would be the licensing issues if they end up being profitable and the threat of just using Google or Bing or whatever other image search engine instead of a devoted one for silly GIFs.

Perhaps I’m missing something?

WhatsApp hit with 72-hour ban in Brazil

Posted on by Paul Jones

WhatsApp has been banned for 72 hours in Brazil:

Brazil has once again opted to temporarily block the popular messaging service WhatsApp in the country. According to Brazilian publication Folha De S.Paulo, the block is scheduled to remain in place for 72 hours, affecting WhatsApp users across the country. The reason for the temporary ban hasn’t yet been revealed, but previous bans have come in response to Facebook’s refusal to comply with federal investigators in in ongoing criminal cases.

I suspect the reason they’re being banned isn’t truly “refusal to comply” but rather “inability to comply.” Not only that, but I wish that government officials would read the Wikipedia page on end-to-end encryption to understand why there’s no way to have any privacy at all with backdoors. Furthermore, the ban of WhatsApp is silly because even if WhatsApp placed a backdoor for Brazilian government officials, some other encrypted communication application will take it’s place.

The government wants your fingerprint to unlock your phone

Posted on by Paul Jones

A major difficulty for government today and ever-growing problem for the government of tomorrow is the rate-of-change of technological advancement. For a axiomatic example, consider this from the L.A. Times via MacRumors:

Even with the limited outlines of the inquiry, Brenner said the act of compelling a person in custody to press her finger against a phone breached the 5th Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination. It forced Bkchadzhyan to testify —without uttering a word — because by moving her finger and unlocking the phone, she authenticated its contents.

On my view, this absolutely violates one’s rights against self-incrimination, because I consider one’s phone to be an extensions of one’s mind. As a defense against this sort of government overstepping, I’d like a “Touch Wipe” option to be available, via Robert Graham:

So I propose adding a new technicality into the mix: “Touch Wipe”. In addition to recording fingerprints to unlock the phone, Apple/Android should add the feature where users record fingerprints to wipe (erase) the phone. For example, I may choose my thumb to unlock, and my forefinger to wipe.
Admittedly, the danger here is wiping your phone when you forgot that your index finger wipes and your thumb unlocks. As an alternative, I could see use in having one code for unlocking, one code for wiping. The fear of you wiping your phone may be enough to deter over-zealous government.

Sharing your Instagram feed (or not)

Posted on by Paul Jones

NYT Tech Tip:

Like many other social media services, your Instagram posts can be public or private, depending on the level of sharing you wish to do. The site’s default setting is public, however — which means that anybody browsing the Instagram site can see your posts and user profile.

Two thoughts:

  1. Anything on the Internet is public;
  2. The company that allows files to be uploaded for free to their external server will seek to pay their light bill and cut divided cheques.

Here’s a tech tip: don’t bother uploading to Instagram unless you’re okay with that.

Intelligent assistants and the future

Posted on by Paul Jones

There’s a lot of excitement about messaging and virtual assistant technologies today. Facebook have launched a chat API, Google have released their natural language API, Microsoft are poised to bring Project Oxford to market as a product, and Apple still retain tight control on Siri. There’s a lot of opportunity here to create useful applications, and the race is on to be the first with the Next Big Thing:

All appear to be efforts to commoditize both speech recognition and natural language understanding. In this context, “commodity” means “ubiquity,” and that bodes well for the large, incumbent solutions providers like IBM, Nuance, Google, and Microsoft. They all stand to benefit by selling more products and services when people ask for solutions that understand the words they say (in addition to text).

There’s a lot to be excited about here, but I’m skeptical about voice as an interface can ever be as efficient as the loop between physical interaction and updating a screen, namely with a terminal. I wonder if the future holds more technically savvy users that don’t want your dumbed-down interface or broadly available and easy to use computers. Personally, I want a future where everyone runs their own cloud server.

Apple’s growth and value on Wall Street

Posted on by Paul Jones

If you’re a publicly traded company on today’s Wall Street, you’re going to need to cater to an audience I somewhat disparagingly call “growth nerds.” These are investors that know the signs of a business that is on a better-than-linear revenue trajectory, and will throw their money at you if you can show them that. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s just the nature of speculation.

There’s another audience on Wall Street, people an organizations that are looking for long-term, slow growth, or reliable dividends. I’ve heard this called “blue chip” or “value stocks”, and these tend to be big, established corporations. Tech companies today are in a unique place: there’s still a lot of growth and instability in companies like Twitter and Uber, but there’s also a lot of stable, value stocks like Oracle and Google. Where I’m going with this is the obsession with “peak iPhone.” Here’s John Gruber on the topic:

[G]iven that you can almost draw a straight line connecting the other four points in the chart, I’m not willing to call it a peak yet. But even if we see a return to growth, it might take several years before we see another Q2 with over 60 million units sold.

I’m a developer that works on Apple platforms and I don’t care if Apple grows in the sense of number of units sold or average selling price or any of those revenue-based growth metrics. If you want to bet on quarter over quarter growth, Android and the web are better for that, at least in part because of Apple’s average selling price. Apple doesn’t need to grow their phone business in my opinion, they need to keep their phones the best in the industry so that users of their products remain engaged. If you want a compelling reason to believe that Apple is a better value stock (and by corollary a safer technological bet) than Google in the long run, look at the metrics around user engagement and purchases within apps. (These metrics are a couple years old, if you find more up-to-date numbers please share them).

Overall, Google Play continues to post huge global download gains and command 60% higher than iOS App Store downloads in Q3 2014. […] In Q3 2014, iOS App Store’s revenue was around 60% higher than Google Play’s.
My point here is that Google’s incentives are better oriented to Wall Street’s growth nerds that’ll appreciate the quantifiable metrics of downloads and taps, and Apple’s strategy has historically been oriented towards capturing a professionals, particularly creatives, and increasingly enterprise clients. I think part of what makes the “peak iPhone” concern so loud is that Apple has been attracting the growth-stock crowd since iPhone’s explosive success. And now that iPhone’s growth phase is at least slowing down, we’re going to see a change in message from Apple, and I think the cautious phrasing of this message from Tim Cook:

Creating value for shareholders by developing great products and services that enrich people’s lives will always be our top priority and the key factor driving our investment and capital allocation decisions.

Namely, that the one “top” priority is creating value for shareholders by creating value for consumers. Of course, creating value for shareholders is often at odds with creating value for consumers in the short term. And while it’s somewhat cliche to say this, but I do get a sense of ethical upstandingness and authenticity from Tim Cook. Considering Apple and Wall Street’s increasingly divergent goals, I recommend considering Chuq Von Rospach‘s recent hypothesis:

Apple announced its dividend and stock buyback programs about 3 years ago. In that time, the number of shares outstanding for the company has dropped almost 15%. That’s a much bigger number than I expected to find.

And that got me thinking… What if Apple has decided to buy a company? But rather than go out and buy a company where integration with Apple’s technology and culture might create their own set of problems, what if Apple decided to buy itself back from Wall Street? What if Apple is planning to go private?

Highly speculative, which is exactly the type of behavior that got Apple here in the first place.

 

Instagram testing new app design

Posted on by Paul Jones

Instagram is testing a re-design of their app that’s more in line with the iOS 7 aesthetic. While I no longer post to Instagram for copyright and privacy reasons, as a user, I’ve always appreciated their app and its design because it was a bold opinion is a sea of faceless black, white, and blue minimalism. However, as a developer, the faceless minimalism trend is great because it makes my job easier.

All new watchOS apps will require using the watchOS 2 SDK

Posted on by Paul Jones

It’s been very trendy to dislike the Apple Watch recently, and especially to decry the future of Apple based on the product’s performance in the marketplace to date. In any case, Apple have kept moving forward with their Watch, from Ben Collier:

Apple’s Developer News states that all new watchOS apps need to be built with watchOS 2.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, the original watchOS apps clearly were a stopgap until Apple could finish the watchOS 2 software. Since its launch there wasn’t a compelling reason to write any new watch apps in anything but the faster and more reliable watchOS 2.

Apps on the Apple Watch are something of a mistake in my opinion. As a very satisfied user of the Watch, I never open an app through the circular app interface: it’s all about notifications, complications, and glances. I’d like to see custom faces announced at WWDC, because I’d love to see what 3rd party developers could do with custom watch faces.

The roadmap to self-driving cars

Posted on by Paul Jones

Jim Dalrymple of The Loop:

Reuters:

In the race to develop self-driving cars, the United States and Europe lead in technology, but China is coming up fast in the outside lane with a regulatory structure that could put it ahead in the popular adoption of autonomous cars on its highways and city streets.

I’m not surprised at all. This is going to be an interesting battle over the next 5 years or so

This is a story of the same proportion as the race to land on the moon. In many ways, the future of humanity depends on self-driving electric cars, because the amount of carbon and physical waste produced by our need for transportation has already irrevocably damaged our only planet. Furthermore, the first country that has a technology company that can get a self-driving product on the road is going to reap a lot of monetary reward. It’s going to take coordinated action from governments to correctly regulate and technology companies to safely implement to pull off a consumer or even B2B self-driving, perhaps electric, car.

What companies do you know of that can pull off radical innovation and package it into a sleek product that people want?

Paul’s week in review response: April 24, 2016

Posted on by Paul Jones

Katie Floyd posts excellent week-in-reviews posts, and I thought I’d offer my thoughts on some of those headlines.

Apple introduced an update to the MacBook Line. The update includes faster processors, longer battery life and a new Rose Gold option.

The MacBook, historically, has been a product which has lower-end hardware and broader appeal than the Pro variant. These MacBooks seem to make a different set of compromises, where the hardware is still lower-end but the price is not, and it’s viscerally appealing (to me and I presume others) but it’s not so broad because of the single USB-C port. I’ve seen a couple in the wild, so I presume they’re popular.

That new MacBook Pro (and hopefully a Retina External Cinema Display) that I’ve been longing for might just be announced at WWDC. Apple has announced the World Wide Developers Conference will kick off June 13th in San Francisco.

It’s difficult not to think about it, but I’ve prepared my bank account for purchasing a refreshed MacBook Pro for 6 months now, so I’m trying to go into this WWDC without any expectations. But I assure Apple executives my bank account is ready for a MacBook Pro!

With regards to WWDC, I haven’t received word about my ticket status yet so I hope they’re are still tickets to be had!

Last week the iTunes Movies and iBooks store suddenly went dark in China.

China and Apple must have such a complicated relationship. China wants to keep Apple’s manufacturing in China, but likely resents an American company putting a camera, microphone, and Internet-connected device into Chinese people’s lives. Similarly, Apple saves a lot of money manufacturing in China and makes a lot of money selling their devices there, but likely resents the privacy compromises it has to make to do business there and the control the Chinese government retain over Apple’s business there.

In legal news this week, the Justice Department has dropped its New York case against Apple in an effort to obtain a passcode for an iPhone 5s. … This news comes on the heals of a report that the FBI paid in excess of $1 million for the hack that was used to access the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5c.

This is a PR battle that I’m pleased Apple to have won. The Feds and government officials must be so embarrassed to have learned nothing from the San Bernardino iPhone, and Apple have been schooling them on the facts about encryption. I’ve been so accustomed to government getting what they want that it’s almost unusual to be happy with this result.