Michael Tsai:

I found several forum posts, but the only solution seems to be to temporarily turn off iMessage, which seems like a terrible solution because it means that you won’t be able to receive iMessages from anyone else in the interim. Worse, the iMessages will look to the sender like they got delivered because they’ll still go to your Mac or iPad.

Ideally, there would be a way to simply start a new conversation using SMS even though there is an iMessage account associated with that phone number.

I absolutely agree. A text message is preferred when reception is spotty, and this whole thing gets very confusing when your talking to someone who has an iMessage account separate from their phone number and a phone number with SMS.

The Intercept reported via a digital forensics firm that iPhones with iCloud enabled send user’s call history to Apple servers:

Russian digital forensics firm Elcomsoft has found that Apple’s mobile devices automatically send a user’s call history to the company’s servers if iCloud is enabled — but the data gets uploaded in many instances without user choice or notification.

“You only need to have iCloud itself enabled” for the data to be sent, said Vladimir Katalov, CEO of Elcomsoft.

This can be justified. Apple do a number of things with your phone call: they allow you to answer calls on any of your devices, they allow third parties to make VoIP calls that look and feel like normal phone calls, for instance. Apple’s response:

“We offer call history syncing as a convenience to our customers so that they can return calls from any of their devices,” an Apple spokesperson said in an email. “Device data is encrypted with a user’s passcode, and access to iCloud data including backups requires the user’s Apple ID and password. Apple recommends all customers select strong passwords and use two-factor authentication.”

It is still technically accessible to law enforcement via a subpoena, but granted, I believe this is true anyway given that carriers would happily provide call logs too. The mistake Apple made here is not in the actual behavior of the phone, but in the disclosure to users. This should have been made clear to the user, or at least found in their famously long agreements.

The Intercept just published a very thoughtful critique of some seemingly incongruous marketing claims and actual behavior from Apple. Starting with:

Apple promises that your iMessage conversations are safe and out of reach from anyone other than you and your friends. But according to a document obtained by The Intercept, your blue-bubbled texts do leave behind a log of which phone numbers you are poised to contact and shares this (and other potentially sensitive metadata) with law enforcement when compelled by court order.

But:

The fact that Apple is able and willing to help the government map the communications networks of its users doesn’t necessarily undermine the company’s posturing (and record) as a guardian of privacy, though this leaked document provides more detail about how the iMessages system can be monitored than has been volunteered in the past. Ideally, customers wouldn’t need to read documents marked “For Official Use Only” in order to know what information Apple may or may not disclose to the police.

If we take the Apple vs. the FBI on face value, it suggests that Apple will fight the government when it believes it’s the right thing to do and that it can win. What’s also rather interesting about Apple’s communication services is that FaceTime was supposed to be open source, which would allow independent review of the security of the protocol. Sadly, the FaceTime protocol never came to be open-sourced, arguably because of patent-trolling. It still seems true given this new evidence that Apple cannot handover the content of your messages, but some important metadata instead.

Apple:

Apple® today announced that macOS™ Sierra, the latest major release of the world’s most advanced desktop operating system, is now available as a free update. macOS Sierra brings Siri® to the Mac® with intelligent and helpful features users know and love from iPhone® and iPad®, along with all-new capabilities designed specifically for use on the desktop. Features like Universal Clipboard, iCloud® Desktop and Documents, Auto Unlock and Apple Pay® on the web help your Mac work even better with other Apple devices. And Photos gets an update with a new Memories feature that automatically creates curated collections of your favorite photos and videos.

The feature I’m most excited for is Auto Unlock!

The on-stage reasons for removing the headphone jack were space, being antiquated, and the advent of wireless. Ben Thompson brought a BuzzFeed article to my attention that goes more in-depth about the space portion of this justification:

Apple executives told BuzzFeed that removing the headphone jack made it possible to bring that image stabilization to the smaller iPhone 7, gave room for a bigger battery, and eliminated a trouble-spot when it came to making the iPhone 7 water-resistant. It’s a solid argument, albeit one not quite worth Schiller’s hubris.

It also adds easier water resistance as a benefit of removing the jack, which I believe is probably true even given the other devices which are water resistant with headphone jacks.

Thompson also raises an excellent point about the iPhone 7 Plus camera. Because there are two sensors, with some clever software which combines triangulated information about the subject with clever guesses about depth, it’s possible to use the iPhone camera to created 3D imagery, even if only very slightly (the greater the space between the two sensors, the more you can triangulate and capture the 3D scene). Here’s how he puts it:

[W]hat Apple didn’t say was that they are releasing the first mass-market virtual reality camera. The same principles that make artificial bokeh possible also go into making imagery for virtual reality headsets. Of course you probably won’t be able to use the iPhone 7 Plus camera in this way — Apple hasn’t released a headset, for one — but when and if they do the ecosystem will already have been primed, and you can bet FaceTime VR will be be an iPhone seller.

What also struck me about this presentation was how conspicuously Schiller brought up machine learning as what powers some of these new features. This, along with artificial intelligence and virtual reality, are the new hotness in the Valley, and it seems to me that Apple is making long-term plays and hedges with the iPhone 7 Plus camera sensor.

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.

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:

It’s a very grainy, short video, but MacRumors discovered a video purporting to display the iPhone 7. Here’s the big camera:

And here’s the lack of a headphone jack:

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!