Rene Ritchie for iMore:

Tim Cook recently said that 60 percent of customers on an iPhone 5s or earlier have not yet upgraded to an iPhone 6 or later. When we polled our readership late last year, a majority of our readers told us they were happy with the current sizes — almost 58%. Of those who did want a smaller iPhone, 12% said it was important enough to them that they’d refrained from upgrading because the iPhones 6 seemed too big. Almost 13%, though, said they were interested in a smaller iPhone especially if it was less expensive than the larger size models.

Shawn King for The Loop:

Whether Apple does this in the spring or not, it certainly makes sense for the company to serve the end of the market that doesn’t need or want one of the ginormous iPhone 6 variations.

John Gruber:

A new 4-inch iPhone with an A9 processor and Touch ID solves a few problems for Apple, in one swoop. It gives Apple a modern iPhone to sell to people who really do prefer the smaller size, and it gives them a low-end-of-the-lineup model that is technically relevant for another 18-24 months.

I almost never like it when analysts harken back to Steve Jobs when it comes to Apple’s future, but I think we may be feeling his persuasive influence still. The notion that a 4-inch device is “perfect” because you can reach all of it with one hand still exists, and may very well be true for some consumers. In my experience, the Plus models are extraordinary. My 6 Plus has completely taken over from my iPad, and continues to gain capabilities that were previously reserved for my MacBook.

Having said that, it is expensive. And should Apple release the “5se”, I think it could be a real crowd pleaser. It predict it’ll be priced around the $500 price point, include Force Touch, NFC, an A9 processor, improved camera, and a 5-class screen at a 6 aspect ratio. Of those 13% who are “interested” and 60% who “haven’t upgraded” into new iPhone users. However, as a developer, I don’t really care if an Apple customer has a 5s or 5se, I’d prefer that Apple continue to convert Android users. To do that will require something more accessible that another phone upwards of $500.

Nellie Bowles for the Guardian:

Engineers look for “big problems” that will push them and for a culture that puts them at the center, Solomon said. He also noted that the best engineers like to work in “flow state” and keep creative hours, which Apple, with its long commute from San Francisco to Cupertino, doesn’t always allow.
“Apple’s not an engineering culture,” Solomon said. “Tim Cook’s done an amazing job running the company, but [Steve Jobs] was the guy everyone wanted to follow into battle.”

This is right for the wrong reasons – characterizing the challenges of the world’s most valuable company by how they’re perceived by a few professionals in the industry will inevitably fail to tell the full story. However, being that big is the source of Apple’s struggles in recruiting, retention, and quality.

Apple have a massive install base of massive software systems, and public expectations are the same as when they were selling iPods and represented 2% of the PC market share. And in order to retain their culture of “world-changing” perception, they have to keep everything a secret, presumably even from within.

That’s my charitable take on this peculiar piece from the Guardian. Apple likely do have problems attracting the world’s top talent, but when you have as much money in the bank as Apple do, it gives them a strong place to negotiate from. Additionally, engineers that bemoan the lack of free food and the rigid start times are likely not the kind Apple wish to attract.

John Gruber on the article:

The other problem Apple faces is that it’s not just any A-team talent that Apple needs, Apple needs A-team talent that understands and appreciates Apple’s design-focused culture.

As a software engineer, I’m very aware that right now, engineer’s have a lot of bargaining power because of their scarcity. Good engineers will always be scarce. That “engineering culture” that Solomon criticizes Apple for not having is probably more that Apple do not pander to entry-level candidates the same way Google or Facebook do with their silly hats and free lunches. But it won’t always be like this, as universities ramp up to meet the demand for software professionals, being a programmer will become more and more like being any other commodity professional. That’s my take of Apple supposed lack of “engineering” culture, because if you look at their actual engineering culture, it’s brought the world WebKit and Swift and, in many ways, the personal computer.

Digitimes are reporting that Apple will release a “4K resolution panel” with the iPad in March, citing “Taiwan-based supply chain makers”:

The new 9.7-inch device will reportedly come equipped with a 4K resolution panel and up to 4GB in RAM, in addition to improved battery life.

While possible, it’s highly unlikely. Consider that the only 4K tablet on the market is made by Panasonic for $6,000, and it ships with 8GB of RAM. The amount of battery and weight added by a 4K panel, as well as the added cost and marginal benefit to consumers, makes this report incredulous.

The speculated Apple car project’s hiring has been frozen, Sam Oliver reports for Apple Insider:

Apple has placed a hiring freeze on the team responsible for the company’s nascent automotive ambitions after executives became unhappy with the project’s direction and progress, AppleInsider has learned.

The change was precipitated by a post-holiday progress review conducted by Apple design chief Jony Ive, according to a previously reliable source with knowledge of the team’s activities. Ive is said to have “expressed his displeasure” with the group’s headway.

In all, Apple is believed to have more than 1,000 people working on Project Titan at sites both inside and outside of Cupertino. Hiring was so aggressive that Apple’s poaching of engineering talent from Tesla is thought to have had a “big impact” on the Elon Musk-led company’s ability to keep up with development of future vehicles.

I would love to know the Apple leadership’s reasoning behind entering the car market. As I’ve speculated before, it wouldn’t be enough to just make a car, or an electric car, or a beautiful car … Apple is either hiding something big or making a big mistake, and they’re no fools in Cupertino.

I’m also curious how the Apple car project is affecting Apple’s existing products. For instance, the iPhone launch is said to have taken top engineers away from the Mac, resulting in a lackluster release one year. I certainly think that software quality on Mac has withered, and it could be in part because of the iPhone’s popularity, and in part because of the brain-drain from the Apple car.

Seth Weintraub quotes KGI’s Ming-Chi Kuo in a report for MacRumors:

We see MacBook as a stronger candidate for becoming a theme given solid growth in the business segment, as well as a potential upgrade to hit the market in 1H16.

I don’t know about whether we’ve hit “peak iPhone” or how this affects Apple’s stock price, but I do know that the Mac as a platform has been neglected in recent years (in comparison to its younger, cooler sibling). To cite a few examples, the Mac App Store is a disgrace, Photos.app is a bit of mess that was ported from iOS, and the filesystem desperately needs upgrading. If market speculation regarding the potential growth of Macs allows Apple to focus on it, I’d jump for joy. The specs I’d like to see this March are:

• Skylake processors,
• faster PCIE storage,
• an upgraded (and perhaps default) graphics chip,
• a 32GB RAM option,
• Force Touch trackpads on the 15-inch models,
• and the new butterfly keyboard.

I’ve read rumors that we’re going to see a re-design as well, and that I could take or leave, I find the present models plenty beautiful and utilitarian.

Daisuke Wakabayashi writing for the WSJ:

Steve Zadesky, a 16-year Apple veteran who has been overseeing its electric-car project for the last two years, has told people he is leaving the company. The timing of his departure isn’t clear. He is still at Apple for now.

Joe Rossignol writing for MacRumors:

Apple’s electric vehicle could be approved for production by 2020, but some employees reportedly believe it “might take several more years” for the iPhone maker to develop a truly differentiated electric vehicle. The project has encountered some challenges internally due to a lack of clear goals, according to the report.

Jordan Golson writing for The Verge:

“While the departure of Apple’s head of automobile efforts may seem like a blow, the reality is Apple has enough money and potential to bring in almost anyone they desire,” says Akshay Anand, analyst with Kelley Blue Book. “This shouldn’t railroad Apple’s efforts and the rumors that they are indeed focused on becoming a player in the automotive space.”

I still struggle to picture, both visually and conceptually, the rumored Apple Car. The car does seem to be the ultimate product in the sense that almost everyone could use one, it’s expensive, and it takes huge amounts of manufacturing and technical expertise to create. However, cars have got many aspects that Apple eschew: it’s highly regulated, it’s highly competitive, and the margins are low (compared to the iPhone).

If Apple truly are entering the car market and they behave the same way they did with the iPhone, they must have an innovation which will allow them to be truly different from the competition and command a high-margin. Because Apple don’t make commodity PCs or phones, it’s safe to assume they won’t make commodity cars, so the high-margin won’t be because of low-cost, it’ll be because of a high-price.

Should this be the case, I think this innovation will be so extreme as to make the cars that Apple make resemble little the cars we know. It won’t be enough that they’re electric, because Tesla do that, or that they’re slickly designed, because many high-end cars are. To me, it seems “personal transport” may be a better label than “car”, because I’d be underwhelmed by an Apple that enters a commodity market with a commodity (or near) product.

Rich Mogull writing for TidBITS,

We are in the midst of fundamentally redefining the relationship between governments and citizens in the face of technological upheavals in human communications. Other [non-Apple] technology leaders are relatively quiet on the issue because they lack the ground to stand on. Not due to personal preferences or business compromises, but because of their business models, and lack of demand from us, their customers.

Apple surely has their customers in mind with their defense of encryption and privacy, but it is also convenient that many of their competitors’ businesses rely on tracking. This has to be one of the reasons iAd was so unceremoniously swept under the rug, why Apple allowed content-blockers on iOS, and why they are such stalwarts about privacy: it’s good for users and it’s good for business.

Today we call on Apple to allow us to release f.lux on iOS, to open up access to the features announced this week, and to support our goal of furthering research in sleep and chronobiology.

The makers of the dimming Flux application want access to private APIs to release in the App Store. In my opinion, they shouldn’t be granted it. Not because they haven’t got a good app, but because these screen whiteness APIs should either be released to everyone or not at all. If they’re released to everyone, we will see as many screen dimming apps as there are farting apps.

Furthermore, the stunt that Flux pulled to distribute their app via GitHub without actually open-sourcing the codebase, by adding an executable binary blob to an empty Xcode project and having user’s side load that, was a terrible move. It made the project look open-source, but was actually executing arbitrary code which no one but Flux knows what does. A bad precedent, and Apple were paying attention, and that is why they’ve drew Apple’s ire and swift sherlocking.

I find Flux’s response poised and classy, but they shouldn’t be allowed to access the private APIs on iOS. They will continue to have tremendous success as a Mac app, and I will continue to use their app. I hope they get their patent approved and Apple license the technology from them. If I were them, however, I would release the code, for iOS and for the Mac, as free and open source. If they’re mission is really “to enable f.lux to advance the science, while providing customized solutions for each person”, then they should go open source. If they had done that in the first place, I bet Apple wouldn’t have minded that they were using private APIs.

And Apple’s ire extends beyond Flux, in the release notes of the Xcode 7.3 beta, it says that they’ve removed all private frameworks from the SDK.

Dave Mark, writing for The Loop:

Elon Musk, in a BBC interview, talks about the Tesla Model 3, in production next year, designed to be affordable for the masses. When asked about Apple’s plans, he (almost reluctantly, it seems) makes the point that it is an open secret that Apple is working on a car of their own.

I’m in two minds about this. Firstly, quite selfish: I, and many of my city-dwelling peers, am not buying a car. Even low-end, second-hand cars are too expensive for the value it would deliver back to me (as far as I can tell). So I’m quite apathetic about the Apple Car.

But! As a developer, I am curious about the potential for 3rd party apps in the car. It’s a place where consumers spend tons of time, commuting, road-tripping, Sunday-driving, all of which are moments that an app, maybe my app, could deliver value. But I’m also highly skeptical that I want code from any ol’ developer running my (very hypothetical) car.

From the WSJ:

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, said the company missed the error as it focused on other aspects of the product. The company didn’t explain how the problem occurred or say exactly when it might be rectified.

“We’re in the process of fixing that now, but our numbers are lower than reality,” he said. “We don’t know what the right number is,” but he added that it was better to undercount than overcount traffic.

Graham Spencer from MacStories writes:

A curious admission from Apple, particularly given that the issue has not been fixed yet. No details are given about the scale of the miscalculation, so it’s unclear as to whether this will result in a minor adjustment or significant adjustment in reader statistics.

Dave Mark for LoopInsight:

… [T]his is an embarrassing hiccough that Apple News did not need.

Eddy Cue has had a number of missteps in the last year: the Apple Music launch at WWDC was poorly executed, the MAS exodus under his leadership, and now a fairly minor analytics bug making front-page headlines.

There’s major cognitive dissonance in the Apple rumor-mill right now. The claim that Apple is developing “Hi-Res Audio streaming up to 96kHz/24bit” contradicts the claim that Apple will “switch away from the common TRRS 3.5mm jack” because high resolution audio is going to be limited to the quality provided by Bluetooth without the 3.5mm jack. And that’s because I will not buy Lightning headphones, because those are headphones for exclusive use with iOS devices. But maybe there’s hope for Bluetooth.

Ford announced that it will support CarPlay and Android Auto in its Ford SYNC product. This reminds me an awful lot of when Motorola allowed iTunes on their phones. 

Rene Ritchie of iMore on Apple’s executive mixup:

What this means for developers in general and indie developers in specific remains to be seen. Historically there have been issues in both orgs. App review has generated complaints about capriciousness and lack of responsiveness pretty much since launch, and that has always been under Schiller. iTunes infrastructure, resources, and tools—or the lack thereof—has been under Cue but now move at least partially under Schiller. In the past, long-requested features like upgrades, trials, and Mac App Store parity have been nebulous in terms of who and how they could be lobbied. Now Schiller’s name is officially on the top and it’s absolutely clear—the buck stops with Schiller.

John Gruber on Daring Fireball:

Treating the App Stores as part of developer relations instead of “media content” is clearly the right way to go. The stores are built on the iTunes Server platform (WebObjects, still!), but running an App Store is nothing like distributing movies, TV shows, books, and music. There are far more improvements that need to be made on the developer relations side of things than the technical side of things (although better search would be welcome).

And Dave Mark on The Loop:

Bottom line, Phil Schiller has a tremendous opportunity for foundational change. He has the chance to make things better for developers in all the App Stores (Mac, iOS, tvOS). Key to this is understanding exactly what the problems are. What is driving some developers to release their apps outside the safety of the official Mac App Store? Why is it so hard to make a living building apps? Are these things fixable? Can Apple make app discovery on the various App Stores easier for users and better for developers?

Apple’s present success is almost entirely (or roughly 56%) due to the iPhone, and its success is almost entirely (perhaps more than 56%) because of wealth of apps found on the App Store. Because there are so many consumers on Apple’s iPhone and because the platform is such a pleasure to develop for, developers have flocked to the iPhone. Arguably, in the early days of the first few iPhones with App Stores, it was for the love of the platform: Mac developers who saw a chance to develop something new and cool. It such a surprise to me that considering this, and considering the resources that must have gone into the latest iTunes Connect update, that something as fundamental as the App Store on iOS and on the Mac has gone from bad to worse.

Worse how? I offer only anecdotes. Sketch has left the MAS after becoming one of its biggest hits. I can reliably freeze the iOS app by spam-hitting the elements in the bottom bar. I have app updates that don’t complete and require a restart or a delete and re-install. I hope that putting Schiller’s alone as responsible for the App Store along with placing his good reputation with developers on the line will solve the App Store’s problems.

I was a holdout. For three years, I used the magnificent iPhone 4S as my trusty telephone. When I upgraded from a feature-phone Nokia handset to an iPhone 4S, all the things I could do made me forget how I did without a smartphone: get all your emails on-the-go, use the decent web-browser to do tasks if a computer wasn’t around, keep yourself completely amused in all idle moments.

A week ago, I picked up the Ridiculously Big iPhone® and it is also one of those products that I already can’t remember how I did without.

My 4S really complimented an iPad well for some tasks: where the phone could send a quick message, the tablet could comfortably guide you through a book.

This 6 Plus, on the other hand, does not play so well with an iPad. It demands use, because as big as it is, it does fit in your pocket … barely, it has a screen that is just shorter than the iPad is wide, and it always has Internet connection (and to connect your iPad to 4G is quite pricey). It’ll send your quick message and then guide you through that book as you quickly switch to your train-ticket app, or whatever else it is you do.

Any media shines on the 6 Plus: it’s in your pocket, so you can play music; it has a massive screen, so you can play games or browse the web or read a book; the portrait keyboard is well-suited to two-handed use, so you needn’t shy from heavy-input use …

But there’s one thing that totally sucks about the 6 Plus.

Checking the time.

Oh I know, the humanity, you’re walking somewhere to do some lovely fun activity or something and you want to check if you’re late and you have to pull out a 5.5 inch telephone to find out. How hard.

But seriously, this device isn’t great for glance-able information, using it demands attention.

But Apple has no need to create the need for a product category which involves glance-able information.

Right guys?

Right?