Apple

Google’s new phone, with a not-so-subtle jab at Apple

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[VIDEO in the main post] Google’s new phone, introduced with this text:

Introducing Pixel, a new phone by Google. It has the highest rated smartphone camera. Ever. A battery that lasts all day. Unlimited storage for all your photos and videos. And it’s the first phone with the Google Assistant built in.

And:

With a best-ever 89 DxOMark Mobile score, Pixel’s camera lets you take brilliant photos in low light, bright light or any light.

And:

  • f/2.0 Aperture – For bright, even photos.
  • Large 1.55μm pixels – For great shots in any light.
  • 12.3MP – For sharp, crisp images.

I’ll leave it to the camera pros to do a side-by-side comparison between the Pixel and the iPhone 7 Plus cameras. Bold claim, though.

Oh, and right there in the middle of the video:

3.5mm headphone jack satisfyingly not new

Yeah, we know who that was aimed at.

Circle, Square, and Venmo: Payment apps let you pay via iMessage

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Glen Fleishman, with a little help from Josh Centers, walks through the payment apps that work inside the iMessage infrastructure. Learned a lot, all very interesting, but found this telling:

We’re still in the early days of iMessage apps, but two prominent payment apps have added iMessage integration: Square Cash and Venmo. A third, Circle, was launched on multiple platforms by entrepreneurs with deep Internet roots. Oddly, PayPal hasn’t yet updated its app to support iMessage payments, but the company often lags putting improvements in its native software.

Is this a wait-and-see on PayPal’s part? They’ve clearly opened a door to the competition. Or perhaps iMessage support is just not that big a deal in the larger world of payment processing.

Some love for the iPhone 7’s new home button

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Jeff Benjamin, writing for 9to5mac, goes into a fair amount of detail on the new iPhone 7 home button. If you’ve not yet had the chance to play with one, this post will answer a lot of questions.

The Home button on the iPhone 7 feels more responsive than the old mechanical Home button, as long as you ensure that you make skin contact with it.

To me, the home button feels different, even odd, because the underlying mechanism is completely different. Rather than a directly coupled microswitch which clicked as you pressed it, the new mechanism relies on a circuit to activate a taptic engine lying underneath the home button.

I get the slightest feeling of delay from the moment I apply pressure to the home button to the moment when I actually feel the vibration from the taptic engine. This could be my imagination, the way my brain translates that different feel, but it certainly will take some getting used to.

Because the new solid state Home button requires skin contact to register presses, this makes interacting with the Home button through non-capacitive gloves or other barriers a non-starter. It also means that you can no longer click the Home button with your fingernail, a practice that many of us with soiled hands have relied on in the past.

I’ve also used my fingernail to press the button without unlocking the phone, just to see the lock screen. Again, just something to get used to.

Yes, the Home button has changed and the change may feel odd at first, but after you get used to it, it’s much better. Going back to the mechanical Home button on my iPhone 6s now feels weird. I’ve simply come to the realization that the new Home button isn’t bad at all, it’s just the way that a Home button on an iPhone 7 is supposed to feel.

The big win here is waterproofing resistance, something the old design would not have supported. So get used to it we will.

Apple Campus 2 drone footage

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[VIDEO]: Matthew Roberts updated his monthly Apple spaceship campus footage. Great stuff.

MacOS Sierra: Using “About This Mac” to clean up your hard drive

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Matt Gemmell tweeted:

Do like the new macOS Sierra thing where you can find which apps/docs/etc you’ve not used in a while.

Embedded in the tweet was an image, showing his Mac after he launched About This Mac and tapped the Storage tab. Like so:

  • Choose “About This Mac” from your Mac’s Apple menu.
  • Tap the Storage tab
  • Tap the Manage… button

Lots of things you can do here. For starters, you can tap Applications (in the sidebar), then tap the Last Accessed header to list Applications in reverse order, which will show you the apps you haven’t accessed in a long time. The longest neglected app I found on my Mac was iPod Software 2.1 Updater.app, which I haven’t touched since 2003.

Before you start deleting old stuff, you might read through the responses to Matt’s tweet, especially the cautions from Kirk McElhearn about deleting Microsoft Office related apps.

And, of course, be sure you back up your Mac before you even think about deleting anything.

The one thing to do to make your MacBook Pro live longer

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Keir Thomas walks through the process of rebonding/regreasing his MacBook Pro’s heatsink. Is this necessary? Will it extend the life of your MacBook Pro? Keir says yes, and he’s got the tech chops to make this look relatively easy.

Though I love getting my hands dirty, I think I’ll hold off on this one until I get my hands on a new MacBook Pro. That said, I found this post and the accompanying pictures fascinating and well worth the read. And, sure enough, his MacBook Pro runs much cooler after his tweaking is done. Cool.

The iPhone 7 finishes last in flawed Which battery life tests

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Blog “Which? Tech Daily” ran the HTC 10, LG G5, Samsung Galaxy S7, and the Apple iPhone 7 through a series of battery tests.

The most notable difference:

Whilst the iPhone 7’s 712 minutes of call time (nearly 12 hours) may sound acceptable, the rival Samsung Galaxy S7 lasted twice as long – and it doesn’t even have the longest lasting battery. The HTC 10 lasted an incredible 1,859 minutes (that’s almost 31 hours).

And:

So just why does the iPhone 7 have such a poor battery life? It may sound obvious, but the majority of the fault lies in its comparatively tiny cell. Smartphone batteries are measured in milliampere hours (mAh). The iPhone 7 has a 1,960mAh battery, whilst the HTC 10 has a 3,000mAh battery: it should hardly be surprising that one battery nearly half the size of another offers roughly half as much charge.

So was this a fair test? Is call time a fair measure of battery life? In browsing/email testing, the battery life was much closer, though the iPhone still finished last.

To me, the bottom line is a battle between thinness/weight and battery life. I rarely have to recharge my iPhone battery during the day. So, for me, the thinness of my iPhone is worth the shorter battery life.

UPDATE: The test compares the iPhone 7 (138.3mm x 67.1mm) against the HTC 10 (145.9mm x 71.9mm), the Samsung Galaxy S7 (142.4mm x 69.6mm), and the LG G5 (149.4mm x 73.9mm). All three competing phones are a fair bit larger than the iPhone 7. Bigger phone equals bigger battery. Thus the addition of the word “flawed” to the post’s title.

iOS 10, the Phone app, and automatic voicemail transcription beta

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If you are using iOS 10 and have not yet encountered automatic voicemail transcription, take a minute and open the Phone app and tap the Voicemail tab.

Tap on a voicemail and you’ll notice that, in addition to the playback controls, there’s now a textual transcription of each message. Though the quality of the transcription can be spotty, it’s usually good enough to get a basic sense of the message.

The service is a beta, which gives me the sense that we’ll see needed improvements to transcription accuracy over time.

Lory Gil pulled together this nice how-to on various aspects of working with iOS 10’s voicemail transcription.

The garage where Apple was born and other tech birthplaces

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On my recent visit to silicon valley, I had the chance to visit the garage where Apple was born, Steve Jobs’ childhood home in Los Altos. Read the main post for some pictures and a link to a map showing other silicon valley startup sites.

Angry customer smashes iPhones, Macs in French Apple Store

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[VIDEO]: From Mashable:

As other people try to stop him, the guy, believed to be in his thirties, shouts:

“Apple is a company that ‘violated’ European consumers’ rights. They refused to reimburse me, I told them: ‘Give me my money back’. They said no. So you know what’s happening? This is happening!” – before wrecking another iPhone.

Amazing to me that no one tried to stop him.

Apple Campus 2, ground level footage

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[VIDEO]: This past weekend, I had the chance to swing by the Apple Campus 2 (the so-called spaceship campus) construction site. I took a quick bit of footage from one of the side roads. I think it gives a real sense of just how big the main building really is. The drone flyovers give a sense of relative scale, but up close the building feels massive.

If you want to watch the video in full screen mode, be sure to click the YouTube link on the bottom of the video frame first. You’ll get a higher resolution version of the clip.

Aetna goes all-in on Apple products, including free Apple Watch for all employees

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From the Aetna press release:

Beginning this fall, Aetna will make Apple Watch available to select large employers and individual customers during open enrollment season, and Aetna will be the first major health care company to subsidize a significant portion of the Apple Watch cost, offering monthly payroll deductions to make covering the remaining cost easier.

In addition to the customer program, Aetna will provide Apple Watch at no cost to its own nearly 50,000 employees, who will participate in the company’s wellness reimbursement program, to encourage them to live more productive, healthy lives.

That is a remarkable endorsement and speaks to the future of the Apple Watch.

Survey suggests strong demand for Apple’s AirPods, and some math

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Bank of America Merrill Lynch (the corporate and investment banking division of Bank of America) ran a survey to get a sense of the public’s AirPod and Apple Watch purchase intentions.

From Business Insider’s writeup of the survey:

12% of U.S. consumers surveyed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch say they intend to purchase AirPods, apparently on the strength of Apple’s marketing, given that few people have actually seen and tried them out.

This is a very bullish sign for Apple, says BAML. “12% of the US installed base could lead to up to an incremental $3bn in revenue,” writes the analysts.

John Gruber, from his analysis:

Not 12 percent of iPhone owners. 12 percent of consumers. For a product that Apple has merely announced, but not yet even started advertising. That’s huge.

As per usual, Gruber’s writeup is worth reading.

Some math:

$3B / $159 = 18.9M

This tells us that it will take 18.9 million AirPod sales to generate $3 billion.

18.9 / 12% = 157M

This tells us that it will take a total population of 157 million for 12% to generate $3B in sales.

There are about 90 million iPhone users in the US (Please ping me if you know a more precise number), so clearly Gruber is right about that. There are about 125 million US households (again, ping me if you have a better number), which dovetails nicely with 157 million total consumers.

With this math in mind, go read Gruber’s take on the survey, including his thoughts on the Apple Watch projections.

Apple Music teases new show, The 411, with Mary J Blige interviewing Hillary Clinton

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Apple Music tweeted a teaser video, with Mary J Blige introducing her new show, exclusively via Apple Music and iTunes. The show, called The 411, will be released tomorrow, September 30th.

I find it interesting to watch Apple experiment with new content models. As they build critical mass, I’d expect Apple to coalesce their offerings into a series of Apple TV channels.

Safari home page changing to Apple start page

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When I fired up my Mac this morning, my Safari home page had changed to Apple’s start page. I asked around and this appears to be happening to other folks as well.

This is certainly good marketing for Apple, as every new Safari page opens as an ad for iPhone 7, Apple Watch, etc. But I set my home page up the way I wanted it. Not sure if this is an intentional move on Apple’s part or, perhaps, just a bug, a reset of the home page. But it happened without my installing anything new on my computer. And it is happening to others, though not to everyone.

If this happened to you, please ping me on Twitter.

Interesting.

Shake Shack founder integrates Apple Watch into new restaurant

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Daniela Galarza, writing for Eater:

NYC restaurateur, Shake Shack founder, and millionaire Danny Meyer is having a good week. He’s invested in a home-cooked food delivery start-up, introduced paid parental leave for all of his employees, and today almost single-handedly made the Apple Watch — a very expensive trophy gadget at best — relevant.

Trophy gadget? Um. No. But to continue:

When Meyer’s 30-year-old Union Square Cafe reopens in Manhattan next month, every floor manager and sommelier will be wearing an Apple Watch. And when a VIP walks through the front door, someone orders a bottle of wine, a new table is seated, a guest waits too long to order her or his drink, or a menu item runs out, every manager will get an alert via the tiny computer attached to their wrist.

This is a new use case for Apple Watch, an interesting idea. If it lives up to its potential, no reason this won’t spread to other restaurants and make the Apple Watch a standard element in restaurant systems.

Apple, Pink Floyd, and an iconic flying pig

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As we mentioned yesterday, Apple is moving their UK headquarters to leased space in London’s iconic Battersea Power Station.

If the name Battersea Station doesn’t immediately summon an image, take a look at this Wikipedia page.

With that image in mind, jump over to this album cover from Pink Floyd’s 1977 release Animals.

Note the flying pig on the album cover. That’s not just a drawing, but a real inflatable pig:

Photographs for the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals album were taken in early December 1976. For the photo shoot, an inflatable pink pig, made by the Zeppelin company, was tethered to one of the southern chimneys.

The pig broke free of its moorings and rose into the flight path of London Heathrow Airport to the astonishment of pilots in approaching planes. The runaway pig was tracked by police helicopters before coming to ground in Kent. Whether the pig escaped, or was released on purpose to increase publicity, is not known.

The flying pig has long been part of Pink Floyd culture, making its appearance at many concerts, and even flying again over Battersea Station in 2011 to celebrate the album’s 35th anniversary.

Personally, I love this link between Apple and such an iconic rock album.

iOS Safari, Android Chrome, tweaked to enable video autoplay

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Jack Marshall, writing for The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. and Google made tweaks to their popular mobile web browsers recently to enable video content to play automatically in web pages, provided audio is muted.

The changes could result in a boost in mobile video consumption for online publishers if they allow their videos to play automatically, and it could unlock new revenue opportunities as a result.

For marketers, the tweaks will enable them to automatically play video content when potential customers visit their websites.

Autoplay means you consume your data plan simply by visiting a site. Some sites hide the video, making it invisible, and others place the video at the bottom of an article, ensuring you’ll need to scroll through the entire article to get to that elusive pause button.

It’s unclear how consumers will react to having videos play automatically on mobile webpages. Some industry observers suggest Facebook’s introduction of autoplay video in its News Feeds has, perhaps, helped people acclimatize to the idea.

But, in addition to potentially being distracting to some web users, autoplay videos could also increase the amount of data people consume through their wireless plans, potentially resulting in extra data charges.

“If you’re visiting a lot of sites with autoplay video then the bandwidth bill will be coming after that,” Mr. Wijering said.

Terrible.

Bloomberg: Apple stepping up plans for Amazon Echo-style smart-home device

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Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is pressing ahead with the development of an Echo-like smart-home device based on the Siri voice assistant, according to people familiar with the matter.

Started more than two years ago, the project has exited the research and development lab and is now in prototype testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced Apple projects. Like Amazon Inc.’s Echo, the device is designed to control appliances, locks, lights and curtains via voice activation, the people said. Apple hasn’t finalized plans for the device and could still scrap the project.

There were breaths of a rumor that this device would see the light of day this year, but they faded away. I’d like to see a device like this as a living room or kitchen information anchor, well integrated with iOS and macOS. The key is to make sure only one device responds when you trigger it with “Hey, Siri”.

iPhone speakers, battery life, and the marketing of wireless

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Ryan Jones noticed an interesting change with Apple’s reported battery life specs.

First, take a look at the image in this tweet.

Note the focus on wireless with the iPhone 7, a word not found in the same iPhone 6s and 6s Plus specs.

From Ryan’s tweet:

Stereo speakers crush battery.

1 hr playback > 10%. Possibly why Apple changed the battery life specs to “wireless”.

Interesting. Clearly, onboard speakers will always chew up more iPhone battery than wireless headphones.

Why? The iPhone speakers are consuming the onboard battery, while the wireless headphones draw from their own batteries, not counting against the battery life measurement for the iPhone itself. There is a nominal drain for Bluetooth communication, but that’s not nearly as big a drain as driving the speakers.

Still a walled garden, but with more doors

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Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge:

iOS 10 moves some of your stuff around a little and makes other stuff look a little different, but fundamentally it acts very much like what you’re used to underneath those new notification bubbles and 3D Touch gimmicks.

But layered underneath those cosmetic changes are some features that push your apps even further, beyond just their icons, into various corners of the operating system. It’s easy to look down your nose at Widgets and iMessage stickers, but when they’re combined with extensions, you begin to see a system where you have access to information from ESPN, Weather, Uber, and much more, all without opening those apps at all. It’s like Android’s widgets, but with a developer ecosystem that might actually be incentivized to support them.

Interesting point. Apple is slowly opening doors into that famously walled garden, enriching the information at its core, making for a better experience for users.

With all the complaints about the iPhone and iOS, I think it’s worth spending a few minutes thinking about how far we’ve come, how much richer our current experience is, warts and all, when compared with the slow and relatively plain experience of years past.

My 2 cents? Apple is right to step very slowly, even if it means Siri can’t immediately tell us what time the Emmys are on. Think bigger picture. Take small, precise steps, release into the wild, measure, learn from your mistakes, rinse and repeat. We’re getting there.

Reuters: Japan’s antitrust watchdog considers action against Apple, carriers

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Yoshiyasu Shida , writing for Reuters:

Japanese regulators are considering taking action against Apple Inc over possible antitrust violations that may have helped it dominate the nation’s smartphone sales, government sources said, a move that could hit the company’s profit margins in one of its most profitable markets.

In a report published last month, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said that NTT Docomo, KDDI Corp and Softbank Group were refusing to sell older surplus iPhone models to third party retailers, thereby hobbling smaller competitors.

This seems more about resellers than Apple. But:

Apple was not named in that report, but two senior government sources told Reuters that regulators were also focusing on Apple’s supply agreements with all three carriers.

Under those deals, surplus stock of older iPhones is kept out of the market and sent to overseas markets, such as Hong Kong, according to industry sources.

It’s all so tawdry.

iPhone 7 display technology shoot-out

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Dr. Raymond M. Soneira, DisplayMate:

At first glance the iPhone 7 looks almost indistinguishable from the 2014 iPhone 6 and 2015 iPhone 6s. Actually, the displays are the same size and have the same pixel resolution. But that is as far as it goes… The iPhone 7 display is a Truly Impressive major enhancement and advancement on the iPhone 6 display… and even every other mobile LCD display that we have ever tested… note that I hand out compliments on displays very carefully. And for those of you thinking of Emailing that we got hand-picked units, the iPhones were purchased retail from Verizon Wireless.

The iPhone 7 got extraordinarily high scores, and this from someone who really knows display tech. Read the post for the details, but this is one area in which the iPhone 7 is hands down the best in class.

Apple looks to open first store in Samsung’s backyard

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Jonathan Cheng, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. has made inquiries about opening its first retail store in South Korea, in a signal that the technology giant may be looking to step up competition in smartphone rival Samsung Group’s backyard.

Apple looked at sites across the street from the Samsung’s longtime headquarters in Seoul, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Cupertino, Calif. company, which is Samsung Electronics Co.’s biggest rival in the mobile-phone market as well as a major customer of its smartphone components, is looking at locations near the South Korean company’s own three-story global flagship store in Seoul’s upscale Gangnam neighborhood, the people said. The company has sent retail executives to South Korea in recent months to check out potential sites for the store, they said.

The people warned that Apple’s plan hasn’t been finalized and a store opening could take about a year.

If this is an intentional leak, really well timed.

The New York Times’ dark, dark Messages review

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Amanda Hess, writing for the New York Times:

Apple built an empire on hermetically sealed systems with sleek, minimalist designs. Nowhere was its strategy more evident than in iMessage, the company’s instant messaging system that offered a free, elegant chatting solution exclusive to Apple devices. Until last week, that is, when Apple updated its software, cracked open iMessage and allowed the ephemera of the outside internet to seep in.

And:

These features mimic the aesthetics of the open internet, which is obsessed with nostalgia and is not exactly subtle. But they can’t replicate the feeling of collecting digital miscellany in our travels across the internet, remixing the material and sending it along to friends who might appreciate the find. The programmatic iMessage sucks the spontaneity from the experience. It standardizes the strange.

And:

Mostly, this thing feels like Facebook. A new class of iMessage apps — yes, apps within an app — lets chatters play Words With Friends, send money through Square or make dinner reservations on OpenTable, all right within the chat window. It feels like iMessage is trying to swallow the rest of your phone.

And:

Each tap into the iMessage world sends you further away from your chat bubbles and deeper into Apple’s labyrinth of special features. Follow the path to its inevitable conclusion, and all of a sudden, you’re no longer talking with your friends. You’re shopping.

I struggle to understand the relationship between the New York Times and Apple. I have long been a Times reader, but its Apple coverage often veers far from objectivity. Articles like this feel like the result of an agenda-laden editorial meeting.

Where’s the balance?