512 Pixels: The Mac line is still kinda broken

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Stephen Hackett lays out his thoughts on the miles to go before the Mac line is back to being “Buy now” instead of “Don’t buy”.

Clearly, the iMac, Mac mini, and Mac Pro are in need of updates. I’d like to think that these updates are coming but just not yet ready for prime time. Time will tell.

Apple’s Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, others sit down to talk MacBook Pro

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This long form piece by Shara Tibken and Connie Guglielmo, for CNET, wraps a sit-down with Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi in an exploration of the history and future of the Mac, sprinkled with observations from other Apple and industry folk.

There’s a lot to absorb here, but it’s well worth the time. It helps that the story design is nicely laid out, a pleasure to explore.

Well done.

Videos of the all new MacBook Pro

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Part of today’s reveal were three new videos that showed off the brand new MacBook Pro. Take a look.

From top to bottom, we’ve got Reveal, which takes the Mac laptop through 25 years of design. Next up is the Jony Ive narrated design video. And finally, there’s the new So much to touch MacBook Pro ad.

Enjoy.

Mixpanel shows iOS 10 adoption up past 73%

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With iOS 9 adoption at 22.3%, that means that more than 95% of iOS users are at iOS 9 or later. Those are numbers that Android can only dream of.

Twitter, with no buyer in sight, confirms layoff of 9% of its workforce

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To me, Twitter is infrastructure, a mechanism used by a majority of the tech space, ubiquitous and valuable. Like Wikipedia, I can’t imagine my day-to-day workflow without Twitter.

Seems likely Twitter will shrink in value until it either becomes small enough to support its existing revenue model, or becomes just too much of an irresistible bargain for some other company.

The question is, will that eventual Twitter resemble the existing Twitter.

Apple said to develop car operating system in BlackBerry country

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Mark Gurman and Gerrit De Vynck, writing for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. has dozens of software engineers in Canada building a car operating system, a rare move for a company that often houses research and development projects close to its Cupertino, California headquarters, according to people familiar with the matter.

Many of the engineers working in Canada were hired over the past year and about two dozen came from BlackBerry Ltd.’s QNX, a leading automotive software provider, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing details of a secret project.

And:

The most notable Apple hire from QNX was its chief executive officer, Dan Dodge. Since joining Apple’s Project Titan car initiative early this year, he’s taken on a larger role overseeing the car operating system, splitting his time between Canada and California, the people said. Another notable addition is Derrick Keefe, who left QNX last year after more than a decade as a senior engineer, one of the people said.

They are all busy skating to where the puck is going to be.

Was the Google Pixel built in a mere 9 months? It would explain a lot…

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Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

The most interesting tidbit comes from David Pierce, a senior staff writer at our sister site Wired. Speaking on the Wired Podcast, Pierce said he was told that the Pixel phones had a mere nine months of development time. After asking Google why the phone didn’t have the same level of water resistance as other high-end flagships, Pierce said, “their answer was essentially ‘We ran out of time.’ There apparently had been this plan for a long time, and at the end of 2015, they blew it all up and started over. So they essentially went from nothing to launch in nine months and a week.”

And:

Let’s examine this timeline. Why would Google “blow everything up” at the end of 2015? We can fill in the blanks with a report from Android Police, which claims that Google’s 2016 smartphone lineup was originally going to be built by Huawei.

“Shortly after the Nexus 5X and 6P launched, Google began talks with Huawei to produce its 2016 smartphone portfolio,” the report reads. “Google, though, set a hard rule for the partnership: Huawei would be relegated to a manufacturing role, producing phones with Google branding.” According to the report, Huawei balked at the lack of branding, and “CEO Richard Yu himself ended negotiations with Google right then and there.”

If we put these two accounts together, it’s easy to conclude that Google and Huawei’s talks ate into the development time of the Google/HTC Pixel. When the decision to go with a self-branded phone came down, Huawei walked away, which led to—as Pierce said—Google “blowing everything up” and switching to HTC.

To some, the Ars Technica headline might imply that the Pixel is less than excellent. I’ll leave that to others to judge, but the Pixel certainly has a lot of fans. To me, getting there with only 9 months of dedicated engineering calendar time is incredibly impressive. The backstory is interesting, though.

Transcript of Apple’s earnings call, and one vexing question

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Shoutout to the community-minded Jason Snell and Serenity Caldwell for capturing the transcript of the earnings call, as they do. Thank you both.

On the call, one particular question that is getting a lot of discussion:

Steve Milunovich, UBS: Some investors are antsy that Apple’s not acquired new profit pools or introduced a financially-material new product in recent years. The question is: A, does Apple today have a grand strategy for what you want to do? I know you won’t tell us what it is, but do you know what you want to do over the next three to maybe five years? Or is it more a “read the market and quickly react”? And B, do you have any sense of — we’re kind of in a gap period where the technology and, arguably, what we’d call the next job to be done, haven’t yet aligned, and maybe in a couple years we will see this flurry of new products and it’ll sort of match what people want to do, but it’s not quite here yet.

And Tim’s response:

We have the strongest pipeline that we’ve ever had and we’re really confident about the things in it, but as usual, we’re not going to talk about what’s in it.

Steve’s followup:

But in terms of your approach, I guess, to new products? Do you have a strong sense of where the technology’s going and where you’re going to play, or is it still enough up in the air that you’re willing to react fairly quickly, which, arguably, your organization allows you to do for the size of the company you are?

Tim:

We have a strong sense of where things go, and we’re very agile to shift as we need to.

Everyone, including Apple’s competitors, wants to know what Apple has up its sleeve. On one level, there’s doubt being expressed as to whether Apple has anything significant up their sleeves at all (as always, Apple is doomed). And on another level, there’s curiosity as to the specifics of what’s coming.

Why ask? Either way, Tim is not going to tell you. And in my opinion, it’s foolish to read anything into Tim’s answer. I believe that Apple has much more in the works than a car and TV content, more than anyone outside the company has seen. I believe that Apple, behind the scenes, is rapidly skating to where the puck is going to be, not reacting to existing market conditions.

Thanks again to iMore, Serenity, and Jason for pulling together this transcript. It makes excellent reading.

Read, search, annotate PDFs with PDF Viewer, free on the iOS App Store

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This is a no-brainer. PDF Viewer is built by the team behind PSPDFKit, the top mobile PDF framework incorporated into apps like Dropbox, Box, HipChat, Evernote and Ulysses and used internally by companies such as IBM, SAP, United Airlines, BMW, Audi and many more. In short, these folks really know the ins and outs of PDF.

PDF Viewer is free on the iOS App Store. Here’s the iTunes link. Go get it.

UPDATE: PDF Viewer was just added to the “New Apps We Love” list in the iOS App Store. Well that didn’t take long!

John Gruber on iMessage’s stickiness

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John Gruber, reacting to this post from Lauren Goode about iMessage stickiness:

There’s a split between iPhone users who are primarily part of the Apple ecosystem (iCloud, Safari, Apple Mail, …) and those who are part of the Google ecosystem (Google Drive, Google Calendar, Chrome, Gmail, …).

iMessage is an exception. With iMessage you get to connect both with iPhone users in the Google ecosystem and iPhone users in the Apple ecosystem. For a lot of us here in the U.S., that’s just about everyone we know. It’s no coincidence that two of Google’s major Android initiatives this year are Allo and Duo, their answers to iMessage and FaceTime. I don’t think it’s going to work.

And:

As an iOS/MacOS exclusive, iMessage is a glue that “keeps people stuck to their iPhones and Macs”, not the glue. iMessage for Android would surely lead some number of iPhone users to switch to Android, but I think that number is small enough to be a rounding error for Apple. Apple wins by creating devices and experiences that people want to use, not that they have to use.

Both Lauren Goode’s original and Gruber’s reaction posts are interesting and worth reading.

As artificial intelligence evolves, so does its criminal potential

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John Markoff, writing for the New York Times:

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password.

Except it’s not your mother. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her.

It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone.

Such a situation is still science fiction — but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

Very believable to me. If they can stick a perfect simulation of Audrey Hepburn in a modern TV ad, it’s not a far stretch to imagine them simulating my mom’s voice.

Scary.

Everything you need to know about AT&T’s deal with Time Warner

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An explainer from the Washington Post on the AT&T Time Warner deal. Two points that stick out:

AT&T, the nation’s second-largest wireless carrier, is buying Time Warner, the storied media titan that owns HBO, CNN and TBS. In an unprecedented step, the deal is going to combine a gigantic telecom operator — which also happens to be the largest pay-TV company — and a massive producer of entertainment content.

It means that for millions of Americans, AT&T will control both the pipes of distribution and much of the shows, movies and other content that travels through the pipes. It’s hard to overstate the significance of this move, both in terms of scale and in terms of the ripple effects this will have on Hollywood, the cable industry, the cellular industry and the broadband industry.

In other words, AT&T may be about to own a huge trove of some of the most recognizable names in media. This is a big moment, because anytime you watch anything owned by Time Warner, that’ll be money in AT&T’s pocket. It’ll put AT&T in direct competition with companies such as Netflix and Amazon, giving it a big incentive to use its content and distribution platform as leverage against them. And it could spur a frenzy of other acquisitions, driving even more consolidation in the industry.

And:

The deal is already drawing loud protests from politicians on both ends of the ideological spectrum, at a time when national conversations about inequality have made critiquing large businesses a matter of populist appeal. U.S. lawmakers are already calling for an antitrust hearing on the issue.

The reaction from business analysts seems mixed; while many agree that buying up content is a natural move for telcos in an era of rapid convergence, some, such as Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson, say it has only a 50-50 chance of succeeding with regulators.

This is far from a done deal. And Apple is still there, waiting in the wings.

New York Times in 2001: “Apple introduces what it calls an easier to use portable music player”

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Matt Richtel, writing for the New York Times when the original iPod was announced:

Apple Computer introduced a portable music player today and declared that the new gadget, called the iPod, was so much easier to use that it would broaden a nascent market in the way the Macintosh once helped make the personal computer accessible to a more general audience.

And:

But while industry analysts said the device appeared to be as consumer friendly as the company said it was, they also pointed to its relatively limited potential audience, around seven million owners of the latest Macintosh computers. Apple said it had not yet decided whether to introduce a version of the music player for computers with the Windows operating system, which is used by more than 90 percent of personal computer users.

And:

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, disputed the concern that the market was limited, and said the company might have trouble meeting holiday demand. He predicted that the improvement in technology he said the iPod represented would inspire consumers to buy Macintosh computers so they could use an iPod.

Think they’ll sell any? I love the reference to that “relatively limited potential audience”.

Blistering footage of a young AC/DC from 1978

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This is phenomenal footage. The venue is a small hall at the University of Essex in Colchester, England, in October of 1978. Angus Young’s guitar-work truly is blistering. Hard to believe he’s only 23 here. Great to watch. Turn it up!

The iPod turns 15: a visual history of Apple’s mobile music icon

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The iPod turned 15 yesterday. The Verge takes you on a visual tour of all of them, from the FireWire port, rotating click wheel first version through the so-called sixth generation with the A8 chip and 8MP iSight camera you can still buy today.

Siri versus Google Assistant

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Marques Brownlee put together the video below, taking Siri and Google Assistant, side by side, through their paces. The set of questions Marques chose were wide in range, but not necessarily definitive. They poked at the boundary of what each assistant did well and poorly, without digging further to find the cliff for each.

There’s a lot to learn watching this. First, it’s clear that Siri holds her own against Google Assistant, despite all the naysaying out there. Neither is perfect, both are useful.

My sense is that both assistants are tree driven, able to answer questions that are within their tree of knowledge. But one cliff for both assistants is context. For example, Marques asked Siri:

Who is the President of the United States?

[Read the main post for the video and thoughts on both]

The zen-like design challenge

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Adrian Hanft, writing for Medium:

A design education begins with a zen-like challenge: place two black squares on a white background.

The professor explains that some arrangements will be dull and lifeless. Those assignments will fail. Other submissions will be dynamic and interesting. Those assignments will pass.

As you set yourself to the seemingly simple task you realize the complexity of the challenge. There are an infinite amount of ways to arrange the squares and you have no crutches because all the other elements of design have been forbidden.

No gradients.

No variation of line weight.

You can’t use the manipulative properties of color.

No shades of gray.

No room for your unique style and personality.

Having never gone to design school, not sure if this challenge is typical, but I definitely found it interesting. Take a look at some of the examples. Some of them clearly “click” more than others. Why?

Design remains an enigmatic mystery to me.

Trolling the IRS scammers

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Alvin Chang, writing for Vox, on his time trolling, then investigating the folks who call claiming they are with the IRS, trying to collect owed taxes.

I found this both dark and fascinating.

Some handy iOS Safari tips

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Jeff Benjamin pulled together this list of tips for 9to5mac. While you might know most of these, odds are, you won’t know all of them. Nice collection.

Apple’s TV boss: ‘Television needs to be reinvented’

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Eddy Cue, speaking at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit (via Business Insider):

“I do think television needs to be reinvented. Today, you live with a glorified VCR,” Cue said. “The problem is the interface.”

“It’s really hard to use [a cable box or satellite TV]. Setting something to record, if you didn’t watch something last night, if you didn’t set it to record, it’s hard to find, it may not be available. There may be some rights issues,” Cue said.

“It’s great to be able to tell your device, ‘I wanna watch the Duke basketball game, I don’t care what channel it’s on.’ I just want to watch the Duke basketball game. Today you got to bring in the TV, go through the guide, find which sports programs or whatever — it’s just hard to do.”

The state of television is in flux. Unlike the music industry, which moved to online purchases and then streaming, the dominant TV business model has yet to emerge. Apple is exploring all sides, trying to find their place in the emerging model. Apple TV, as currently implemented, is a portal. But Apple is also dipping its toes in the waters of original content.

Netflix has definitely found success with original content that is not dependent on cable companies for distribution. HBO has original content but is straddling the lines of the a la carte (HBO Now) and the more traditional bundle (as part of a cable package). Hulu and Amazon have their own approaches. Sports and more traditional programming add another wrinkle.

All of this adds up to a mish-mosh of standards. What’s needed is a unifying force to make it possible to watch all this content on demand while, at the same time, making the content universally and intelligently searchable and schedulable.

Seems to me that Apple TV is well placed to be that unifying portal, but an irresistible force is needed to bring all these disparate elements together.

Band of thieves swipe $13K in iPhones from busy Apple store

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Apple Insider:

As reported by The MetroWest Daily News, police said the Apple Natick Collection outlet was the scene of a speedy burglary on Tuesday perpetrated by a group of seven unidentified individuals. Described as a “pack,” the suspects are believed to be teens or young men and women.

And:

Wearing hoodies, the roving gang can be seen entering the mall at around 7:15 p.m., making a beeline straight for Apple. Once inside, the suspects gathered around display tables at the store’s entrance —iPhones are usually placed prominently on the sales floor to lure in passersby —ripped 19 iPhones from their security tethers and scrambled out. The heist was over in less than a minute.

This is not the first time this has happened. Apple is removing the tethers from the tables, replacing them with a software “kill switch” that disables the phones when they move out of range.