Yesterday, we embedded a video pulled together by David Pogue on the 4 people Steve Jobs handpicked to review the original iPhone.
David Pogue also wrote a cover story for CBS News with a broader embedded video, which includes bits of the “4 original iPhone reviewers” piece, but goes further, including an interview with Bas Ording, an iPhone engineer who helped pull together the original touch screen mechanics.
Matt Birchler:
Auto updates only happen when you are connected to Wifi, but iOS won’t stop you from updating on cellular if you tap the update button. The fact that someone could blow through 10% of their monthly data plan (2GB) just by updating Snapchat and Messenger once. This could be tough if you do it once, but Facebook updates Messenger all the time. They’ve updated the app 5 times in the past month, which could work out to upwards of 400-500 MB over just a month.
And:
“App thinning” is not a magic bullet that erases this problem though, as Facebook Messenger, which shows as being 154 MB, still downloaded 99MB of data for its update.
And:
So are giant app sizes a problem? Yes. Do delta updates allow these updates to use less data? Yes. Do delta updates make these large apps a non-issue? Hell no!
And from this Washington Post article, titled It’s not just you: Your iPhone storage isn’t going as far as it used to:
Apple has announced some features that may be able to help with this problem down the line. In iOS 11, due out in the fall, there is a feature that lets you “offload” apps you use less often — deleting the apps themselves from your phone, but retaining enough data so that you don’t have to set them up again.
Screens are getting larger, pixels denser, which means the resources used to support those bigger/denser screens are growing larger. Add to that the steadily increasing complexity of Apple’s SDKs, and it is clear that device storage availability continues to be a tricky balancing act.
But this is “same as it ever was”. Ever since the dawn of the modern computing era, memory and drive size was always a constrained resource and memory and drive sizes grew and software techniques were developed to meet demand with every new generation.
[VIDEO] Last night, the Computer History Museum hosted Pulitzer Prize journalist John Markoff as he interviewed forrmer iPhone engineering team members Hugo Fiennes, Nitin Ganatra and Scott Herz, followed by a second interview with Scott Forstall.
This is a historic interview. This team worked on technology that changed the world. They made the decisions that informed the design you know and love. And they worked with Steve Jobs.
The interview is full of wonderful anecdotes, well worth your time. I’ve embedded a YouTube video in the main Loop post. But if it gets yanked, give this link a try.
Enjoy.
From the Computer History Museum schedule of events:
How did iPhone come to be? On June 20, four members of the original development team will discuss the secret Apple project, which in the past decade has remade the computer industry, changed the business landscape, and become a tool in the hands of more than a billion people around the world.
Scott Forstall, the leader of the original iPhone software team will take part in a fireside chat with Computer History Museum historian John Markoff. A panel with three of the engineers who worked on the original iPhone, Nitin Ganatra, Scott Herz, and Hugo Fiennes, will describe how the iPhone came to be.
That’s tonight at 6p PT. If anyone goes, please do take some video, share online. Wish I could be there.
Josh Centers posts about what’s new in tvOS 11, but then goes further, digging into what’s still needed.
I’d go further, and add the ability to support multiple Bluetooth interfaces, as I’ve written about here:
Pair two sets of AirPods to a single Apple TV: This would allow my wife and I to listen on headphones, each with a different volume level, a blessing for people with different hearing needs and for parents with sleeping infants.
Pass the audio through to HDMI while AirPods are active: This would allow someone with a hearing deficit to listen at a louder volume while the room gets the regular volume.
Terrific read.
Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:
The book claiming to explore the secret history of the iPhone, The One Device, is now on sale in physical form ($19 at Amazon). You can also preorder the ebook for Kindle and iBooks as well; it will be released digitally on Thursday.
The book in question is The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. Here’s a link to the book on Amazon. Looks like the Kindle version is available now, though it seems like this might only be in the US.
Authored by Brian Merchant, the book promises to detail the ‘untold account’ of how the iPhone was made. It features anecdotes from ex-Apple executives and top employees about the development of the secret project, as well as an ‘undercover’ trip to Foxconn and more. Early reviews of ‘The One Device’ are mixed.
Follow the headline link for details on the reviews. They are, indeed, mixed.
Jason Snell, Six Colors:
while the App Store has indeed had an editorial team for quite a while, Apple’s approach to App Store editorial has been nearly invisible. Editors select apps to highlight and might write short bits of text for use in collections, but for the most part the job has seemed to be more about curation than words.
This is not meant to disparage curation—it’s an important job and one of the ways the App Store can highlight the hard work of app developers who are making polished, impressive products.
Damn right! Curation is a skill and highly polished curation a valuable skill.
With iOS 11, though, Apple’s really showing that it has redefined what the App Store editorial team is for. In the redesigned App Store app in iOS 11, app highlights go way beyond buttons that would present an app’s App Store page when you tapped. The new Today tab is populated with full-fledged feature articles, with screen shots, videos, animations, pull quotes, and real writing.
The change is pretty impressive. To get a sense of this, take a look at the Monument Valley 2 screenshot in Jason’s post. That’s some beautiful prose there. And well written copy helps the user get a sense of the game’s value, helps the developer by spurring sales, and helps put more coin in Apple’s bank. Win, win, win.
Yahoo Finance:
When AAPL released the Apple Watch, it included a heart rate sensor. It has proven extremely accurate in testing, recently coming within 2% of the numbers reported by an electrocardiograph (EKG). However, AAPL has never marketed it as a medical device, because doing so would mean FDA certification.
Once under FDA regulation, the company would have to get each Apple Watch certified, in a process that could require months. Having to go through FDA certification would also reveal AAPL’s products before release — something the secretive company would hate — and could delay rolling out software updates.
But:
The FDA just announced its new Digital Health Innovation Plan, and it could change everything.
Noting that digital technologies used in consumer devices “have the power to transform health care,” the agency is trying to streamline the process needed for FDA approval. With a fall target for the pilot program, the FDA says it’s considering creation of a:
“Third party certification program under which lower risk digital health products could be marketed without FDA premarket review and higher risk products could be marketed with a streamlined FDA premarket review.”
The implications for AAPL and the Apple Watch are huge.
Risky path, privacy implications abound. But a perfect path for Apple.
[VIDEO] This looks phenomenal. Check out the trailer (embedded in the main Loop post).
Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:
The scale of Apple’s iPhone supply chain operation demands military precision. Producing and selling 212M iPhones a year (in 2016) requires very different “people, processes, and purposes” than were needed when Apple was selling relatively modest numbers of Macintosh personal computers (4.6M units in its 2000 Fiscal Year, climbing to 5.3M units in FY 2006).
How did Apple grow from 5.3M Macs in 2006 to 212M iPhones last year, a 40X multiple? In one of his many Apple 2.0 strokes of genius, Steve Jobs hired an experienced supply chain executive, Tim Cook. With Jobs’ support and inspiration, the future COO and CEO assembled the necessary team, set new rules, and forged new partnerships. As quantity begets nature, Apple became a different company.
…although not entirely.
Another great read from Jean-Louis, including this take on the snipe at Phil Schiller as told in the about to be released The One Device — The Secret History of the iPhone:
Lovely. Besides looking at Schiller’s education and early programming experience, one has to ask how long would have Schiller lasted under Jobs if he wasn’t “technical enough”? As Monday Note readers know, I don’t agree with Phil’s every utterance, but the obvious disconnection with easily ascertained facts casts a shadow on the author’s credibility and motivations. Schiller rejoined Apple in 1997 and has worked directly for Steve and Tim ever since.
Read the rest of Jean-Louis’ post here. As for the book, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
M.G. Siegler, in this Medium post:
No less than Steve Jobs himself said to Walter Isaacson in interviews for his biography that Apple had “finally cracked it” with regard to what they wanted to do in television.
That was six years ago. We’re still waiting to see the fruits of that labor. It’s starting to feel like we may never see them.
And:
We’re now seeing what Apple thinks it must do: compete with Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. Apple spent a bunch of time suggesting they would not take this approach. Their original content was all about promoting Apple Music or whatnot. But you don’t hire these two guys if you’re not going all-in on content.
And by “these two guys”, M.G. is referring to Apple’s hiring of former Sony Executives Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg (the production team behind mega-hits such as Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and The Crown which, in my mind, is about as original as TV content gets).
More from M.G.:
If Apple can build a viable Netflix competitor, they’ll have decidedly more leverage. But they also run the risk of alienating the powers-that-be in Hollywood, just as Netflix turned from friend (licensing their old content) to foe (bidding for the first-run premium content).
Part of the challenge for Apple is putting up an ecosystem fence around Apple TV. They’ve been unable to negotiate the kind of terms that allowed iTunes to flip the music industry on its head. And Apple does not own a critical mass of content to pursue a Netflix-like strategy. Will “these two guys” be the start of the next generation Apple TV original content?
I like the play, looking forward to watching what emerges.
Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:
Upgrading more often than the average person is an occupational hazard of gadget addicts – and even more so of tech writers. But I do at least try to resist when an update is a relatively minor one.
I’d hoped that would be the case with the 10.5-inch iPad Pro. After all, I already owned the 9.7-inch Pro, so already had some of the more advanced features like True Tone. And 10.5 inches isn’t that much bigger than 9.7 inches, right?
Still, I had to be sure, so I wandered into the Regent Street Apple Store to try one out
There’s something about this so-called goldilocks iPad Pro, something compelling, in the same way as AirPods are compelling, but calling out from an already mature product line.
Ben’s journey is an interesting read and rang true for me. I hear that iPad calling.
[VIDEO] A cool feature, true, but what really stuck with me watching this video (embedded in main Loop post) was how bright, vibrant, and smoothly animating that screen is. Far, we’ve come.
Neil’s a smart guy and this is a fantastic read. A few tastes:
Apple is not overselling the device’s speaker capabilities. In a somewhat controlled environment resembling a typical living room, HomePod’s sound output clearly stood out from that of Amazon Echo and Sonos Play 3. In fact, it made the Amazon Echo sound like a cheap toy, and the Sonos Play 3 sounded so inferior, I wondered if something was wrong with the Sonos.
And:
HomePod’s value isn’t found in asking Siri for sports scores or controlling the kitchen lights. HomePod’s value is found in an A8 chip controlling a series of microphones and speakers.
HomePod is a computer capable of mapping a room and then adjusting its sound output accordingly. This is another way of saying that HomePod is able to capture its surroundings and then use that information to tailor a specific experience to the listener. It is easy to see how collecting data and then using that data to improve the experience will position HomePod as an augmented reality (or maybe we should say augmented hearing) device.
Augmented hearing, a very specific form of augmented reality. And this is key to the future of HomePod. More from Neil:
A few augmented reality examples include the HomePod recording and copying the sound from one location or room and then replicating that sound in another room. This would be game changing as it would be as though we were in a completely different room even though we hadn’t changed locations. An adult would be able to speak to a child in another room by simply talking out loud in a regular tone thanks to multiple HomePods.
The idea of speaking to someone in another room in a conversational voice is just one (albeit fantastic) capability that could be unlocked by HomePod. Being a great music delivery service is a bit of a trojan horse to get one in the door. But the HomePod (in your house) and AirPods (out and about) are much more than music delivery devices. They are extensions of the ecosystem.
[VIDEO] Nice video (embedded in the main Loop post) from Mac Rumors, showing off Siri’s deep-learning powered iOS 11 voices, as well as advances in contextual awareness. Well done, worth watching.
I’m a fan of Mac gaming, look forward to the updates to the MacGamerHQ top lists. This is not a competitive list (which game is #1, etc.) but more a curated list that you can browse to see which games appeal to you.
Me? I’ve got my eye on Obduction and The Witness.
Associated Press:
A Taiwanese company that assembles Apple’s iPhones and other electronics is considering building a plant in Wisconsin that could employ thousands of people and give Gov. Scott Walker a huge political boost as he prepares to run for re-election.
A person with direct knowledge of the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly confirmed to the Associated Press on Wednesday that the state is in talks with Foxconn. At least one other upper Midwest state, Michigan, is also pursuing the plant.
This could be a rumor, could be Foxconn simply exploring options, could be Foxconn setting up a bidding war between Wisconsin and Michigan. No matter, this has interesting implications in terms of Apple potentially building future product in the US.
Christina Farr, CNBC:
Imagine turning to your iPhone for all your health and medical information — every doctor’s visit, lab test result, prescription and other health information, all available in a snapshot on your phone and shared with your doctor on command. No more logging into hospital web sites or having to call your previous doctor to get them to forward all that information to your new one.
Apple is working on making that scenario a reality.
And:
CNBC has learned that a secretive team within Apple’s growing health unit has been in talks with developers, hospitals and other industry groups about bringing clinical data, such as detailed lab results and allergy lists, to the iPhone, according to a half-dozen people familiar with the team. And from there, users could choose to share it with third parties, like hospitals and health developers.
This day can’t come soon enough. The sharing of medical data, in a safe, secure, and privacy respecting manner, is a space ripe for disruption. Apple is the right player to make this happen.
Apple’s HomePod and Google Home show as a distant second to Amazon Echo. You can see the polling data here. Most of this is due to price.
That said, the HomePod is just an announcement, not yet a product in the wild, something people can actually fully experience. The fact that the HomePod is pretty much tied with Google Home, a product that is currently shipping and in people’s homes, tells me that there is a strong potential market for HomePod.
With price as a strong decision point for buyers, I suspect this data means the market will segregate into strong layers, with Amazon owning the cheap seats, Apple owning the higher tiers, and brand loyalty dividing the areas in between.
The Atlantic:
Apple has always been fond of dreaming up hardware and software from a not-too-distant future, and there are glimmers of the iPhone in Apple’s history since long before the rumors about the device were taken seriously in the early 2000s. More than a decade before the smartphone was unveiled, Apple shared with the computing magazine Macworld a semi-outlandish design for a videophone-PDA that could exchange data. (Smartphones eventually made the PDA, or personal digital assistant, obsolete.)
The prototype for the device, published in the May 1995 issue of the magazine, is something of a missing link between the Newton and the iPhone—though still more parts the former than the latter.
Interesting look back. Be sure to take a look at the pictures.
Steven Sinofsky, Medium:
Many of us have been using the dev builds of iOS 11 and MacOS High Sierra this week. I wanted to share some thoughts on what I think are some of the important advances.
And:
APFS is an entirely new file system enabling such features as clones, snapshots, encryption, 64-bit limits on file counts and sizes, crash protection, crazy performance for large file operations, and more.
And:
I’ve lived through all the Apple migrations and all the DOS/Windows migrations and not only is this among the most feature-rich releases, it is actually running right now on my Mac (and iPhone) after an in-place upgrade. I seriously sat there watching the install process thinking “this is going to take like a day to finish and it will probably fail and roll back in the middle or something”. After about 30 minutes the whole thing was complete. The amount of amazing engineering that went into both the creation and deployment of APFS is mind-blowing. And that it was done on phones, watches, and PCs is nothing short of spectacular and except for maybe the transition from FAT to FAT32, I can’t recall anything even close to this. There are a ton of features under the covers that will surface in use of Apple devices, but mostly it will just make everything better seamlessly.
There’s a lot more to this post, but I thought these words were worth highlighting. Sinofsky knows about designing, building, and delivering file systems. This is high praise indeed.
Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:
When Apple introduced its 64-bit A7 processor in September, 2013, they caught the industry by surprise. According to an ex-Intel gent who’s now at a long-established Sand Hill Road venture firm, the competitive analysis group at the imperial x86 maker had no idea Apple was cooking a 64-bit chip.
And:
The industry came to accept the idea Apple has one of the best, if not the best, silicon design teams; the company just hired Esin Terzioglu, who oversaw the engineering organization of Qualcomm’s core communications chips business. By moving its smartphones and tablets — hardware and software together — into the 64-bit world, Apple built a moat that’s as dominant as Google’s superior Search, as unassailable as the aging Wintel dominion once was.
Interestingly, yesterday we learned that Google hired away one of Apple’s chief SoC designers to work on chip design for Pixel.
I think we might be seeing another moat built, this time across the fields of Augmented Reality (AR), Machine Vision (MV), and, more generally, Machine Learning (ML).
And:
As many observers have pointed out, Apple just created the largest installed base of AR-capable devices. There may be more Android devices than iPhones and iPads, but the Android software isn’t coupled to hardware. The wall protecting the massive Android castle is fractured.
Lots more to this. Fascinating read. Apple is making some foundational investments that will leverage their blazing fast chip designs and machine learning to bring object recognition, machine vision, and augmented reality to life.
Recently, we learned that AirPods will pair automatically with an Apple TV running tvOS 11. This is great news, but there are two features I’d love to see for future versions of tvOS:
Pair two sets of AirPods to a single Apple TV: This would allow my wife and I to listen on headphones, each with a different volume level, a blessing for people with different hearing needs and for parents with sleeping infants.
Pass the audio through to HDMI while AirPods are active: This would allow someone with a hearing deficit to listen at a louder volume while the room gets the regular volume.
Anyone else with the same needs here? Anything else to add to this particular wish list? Ping me.
[VIDEO] In the video embedded in the main Loop post, Jeff Benjamin walks through the process of organizing your iPhone’s home screen using iOS 11 drag and drop. This is a fantastic use of drag and drop and an easy way to get your head around how this works.
Here’s a clue:
I’ve spent the last week using a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro, and this is, in many ways, the easiest product review I’ve ever written. There are several significant improvements to the hardware, and no tradeoffs or downsides. There is no “but”.
Read the review. Fantastic upsides, no downside save price. The only question for me is which size to buy.
A few days ago, chess players using 32-bit devices found themselves locked out of chess.com. From the forum:
The reason that some iOS devices are unable to connect to live chess games is because of a limit in 32bit devices which cannot handle gameIDs above 2,147,483,647. So, literally, once we hit more than 2 billion games, older iOS devices fail to interpret that number! This was obviously an unforeseen bug that was nearly impossible to anticipate and we apologize for the frustration. We are currently working on a fix and should have it resolved within 48 hours.
This sort of thing comes up in computing periodically. In this case, if I’m reading this correctly, the variable used to hold the gameID was not big enough to handle chess.com’s growth. It is not clear if this problem is limited to iOS devices.
Could the developers have seen this coming? Probably. And even if they didn’t anticipate their success, they might have seen the gameID approaching this limit, made the change earlier.
There’s a lot to process in this 110 slide presentation on Apple’s China business. At its core, China is placing restrictions that are breaking the stickiness of Apple’s ecosystem.
From the China Channel presentation:
TO MOST CHINESE IPHONE USERS THE IPHONE IS JUST A LUXURY PHONE. THEY HAVE NO SIGNIFICANT INVESTMENT IN APPLE’S SERVICES ECOSYSTEM
And:
APPLE’S CHINA SERVICE ECOSYSTEM HAS BEEN SYSTEMATICALLY STRIPPED AWAY BY LOCAL COMPETITORS
And:
FROM APRIL 2016 IBOOKS AND ITUNES STORE HAVE BEEN BLOCKED IN CHINA. CHINESE AUTHORITIES ORDERED THEM TO BE TAKEN OFFLINE.
In most markets, Apple can depend on ecosystem loyalty. Most iPhone users would never even think of shifting over to an Android device. There’s brand loyalty, for sure, but there’s also ecosystem stickiness at work here. My photos, music, documents, etc., are all on my Apple devices, and I already have a great deal of expertise in using all this data, moving around the ecosystem. There’s little incentive to shifting over to Android.
According to this presentation, the Apple ecosystem stickiness is broken. For example, iMessage is hardly used in China. China is dominated by Android devices, iMessage is Apple device specific, spam is a huge issue, and WeChat is an entrenched tech in China, making it hard for iMessage to gain a foothold.
Can Apple overcome these obstacles? No doubt. But understanding the problems and retooling to overcome them is key.
Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:
It’s been a week since Apple announced the new 10.5-inch iPad Pro, and the early reviews are now in. While reviewers do express a few reservations along the way, the overwhelming tone is positive.
Phrases like ‘Apple pays off its future-of-computing promise’ and ‘the biggest step forward the category has made yet’ suggest that tech writers are finally taking seriously Apple’s claim that an iPad is for many a realistic replacement for a PC.
There is disagreement about just how far that claim stretches, and eyebrows raised over the all-in price of a device that makes little sense without a Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil, but those are the only real reservations found.
Great collection of reviews. You might also want to take a look at this review Serenity Caldwell did for iMore.
Impressive reviews.
Johnny Lin, Medium:
I scrolled down the list in the Productivity category and saw apps from well-known companies like Dropbox, Evernote, and Microsoft. That was to be expected. But what’s this? The #10 Top Grossing Productivity app (as of June 7th, 2017) was an app called “Mobile protection :Clean & Security VPN”.
Watch as Johnny Lin follows the money. This is no isolated incident.
In a nutshell, you need to update your AirPods firmware, then connect to an iOS 11 device to capture the updated Settings. Not a solution for everyone, but if you’ve got access to a single device running the iOS 11 beta, this seems to transfer the updating settings to your iOS 10 device.