Business

Facebook, your shadow profile, and those Apple talking points

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[VIDEO] Facebook. What a mess. Mark Zuckerberg’s two day appearance before Congress has everyone riveted. He’s clearly been incredibly well prepped, expertly responding without answering.

Tons has been written about this, but here are three posts that stood out to me:

  • Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies walks you through this reaction poll, asking questions about Facebook and trust.

One takeaway:

Only 15% of our panelists said there is nothing Facebook can do to regain trust as they are just ready to move on to something else.

I would have thought that number would be much higher.

First things first, this is absolutely worth reading. Gruber digs deep, deconstructs those talking points. Brilliant.

I have to say, I am surprised that no one in that room thought to bring up a comparison between Apple and Facebook when it comes to privacy. Would have been good to give some expert witnesses, who really understand the subtleties at play here, the chance to ask Zuckerberg some specific questions, to help guide the conversation.

  • Finally, here’s a video (embedded in the main Loop post) from The Verge’s Russell Brandom, talking about Facebook, Zuckerberg’s testimony, and shadow profiles. It’s only 3:28 and well worth your time.

Apple is the richest company, so where are the billionaires?

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Bloomberg:

Finding billionaires in Silicon Valley isn’t hard. Dropbox Inc.’s Arash Ferdowsi and Veeva Systems Inc.’s Peter Gassner have both crossed the threshold this year, and tech fortunes make up a fifth — or about $1 trillion — of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

But tracking down members of the three-comma club at Apple Inc. is a less fruitful endeavor, even though the iPhone-maker is the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of $879 billion.

Chairman Art Levinson is the only insider to make the cut, and Apple stock accounts for just 20 percent of his $1 billion fortune, according to regulatory filings. The rest comes from his long tenure at Genentech Inc., where he was chairman and chief executive officer, and an early stake in Google Inc.

No other Apple insider comes close.

I think one core attribute of any huge company with few or no billionaires is a long legacy. A tech company born in current times that then grows huge is much more likely to make a billionaire or two. Or three.

Apple’s big growth curve happened long before billion dollar valuations were common. They went public in 1980, fragmenting their ownership stake, making it that much harder for a single person to emerge as a billionaire.

Thoughtful article.

Latest watchOS beta warns users when opening watchOS 1 apps, says support will end soon

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Apple Insider:

A message included in Apple’s first watchOS 4.3.1 beta warns users that older apps will no longer be supported in “future versions” of the operating system, suggesting support for software built with the watchOS 1.0 SDK could be deprecated with watchOS 5.

This is about watchOS apps built using outdated parts of the SDK. Another side of this: Will watchOS 5 continue to support the original Apple Watch hardware?

FTC says ‘warranty void if removed’ stickers are BS, warns manufacturers they’re breaking the law

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Motherboard:

As we’ve reported before, it is bullshit and illegal under federal law for electronics manufacturers to put “Warranty Void if Removed” stickers on their gadgets, and it’s also illegal for companies to void your warranty if you fix your device yourself or via a third party.

And:

Companies such as Sony and Microsoft pepper the edges of their game consoles with warning labels telling customers that breaking the seal voids the warranty. That’s illegal. Thanks to the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, no manufacturer is allowed to put repair restrictions on a device it offers a warranty on. Dozens of companies do it anyway, and the FTC has put them on notice. Apple, meanwhile, routinely tells customers not to use third party repair companies, and aftermarket parts regularly break iPhones due to software updates.

Interesting. Going to do more reading on the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.

Apple now runs on 100% green energy, and here’s how it got there

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This is a follow-up to Apple’s press release, which dropped Monday.

Mark Sullivan, Fast Company:

You have to see Apple’s Reno, Nevada, data center from the inside to truly understand how huge it is. It’s made up of five long white buildings sitting side by side on a dry scrubby landscape just off I-80, and the corridor that connects them through the middle is a quarter-mile long. On either side are big, dark rooms–more than 50 of them–filled with more than 200,000 identical servers, tiny lights winking in the dark from their front panels. This is where Siri lives. And iCloud. And Apple Music. And Apple Pay.

Powering all these machines, and keeping them cool, takes a lot of power–constant, uninterrupted, redundant power. At the Reno data center, that means 100% green power from three different Apple solar farms.

And:

Now Apple says it’s finished getting the rest of its facilities running on 100% green power–from its new Apple Park headquarters, which has one of the largest solar roofs on the planet, to its distribution centers and retail stores around the world. Though the 100% figure covers only Apple’s own operations–not those of of the suppliers and contract manufacturers which do much of the work of bringing its ideas to life–it’s also convinced 23 companies in its supply chain to sign a pledge to get to 100% renewable energy for the portion of their business relating to Apple products.

Part of this equation is Renewable Energy Certificates:

One REC is equal to a single megawatt of power produced from a renewable energy source.

And:

It turns out RECs (like carbon credits) can be sold independent of the energy itself. So it’s also possible for a large power consumer to buy only the RECs–and not the power–from a renewable energy project and use them to offset its use of dirty energy at one of its own facilities.

Apple could easily go down that road, buying its way to green. This from VP of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson:

“I am not aware of any other company that uses that same stringency for making sure the clean power that they’re investing in or purchasing is on the regional grid where it’s being used,” she boasts. But she acknowledges that there are still places in the world where that’s not possible, though that may have more to do with the reality of power markets than choices Apple has made. In some cases, the company has had to sign long-term contracts to acquire the RECs from a new project it helped create elsewhere in the same region. That was the case recently for a two-person office in Chile. There was no suitable green energy source nearby, so Apple is now offsetting the brown power used by that office with RECs from one of its green-power projects in Brazil.

Apple does not need to do this. They could simply buy their way into compliance. Credit where credit is due.

New web standard would allow Touch ID and Face ID to be used to login to websites

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Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

A new web standard being recommended for adoption would open the way for both Face ID and Touch ID to be used to login to websites.

The API, known as WebAuthn, allows existing security devices – like fingerprint readers, cameras and USB keys – to be used for website authentication

And:

There’s as yet no word on Safari, but with all current and recent iPhones and iPads offering either Face ID or Touch ID, and the latter supported on the MacBook Pro too, this would be tailor-made for Apple. It cannot be used with other browsers without Apple’s support.

Very interesting.

Apple must pay $502.6 million to VirnetX, federal jury rules (but don’t hold your breath)

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Bloomberg:

VirnetX Holding Corp. won $502.6 million against Apple Inc. after a federal jury in Texas said the maker of iPhones was infringing patents for secure communications, the latest twist in a dispute now in its eighth year.

VirnetX stock went up as much as 44% on the news, Apple stock not so much. Makes sense, since VernetX reported about $1 million in revenue last year, Apple a bit more than $200 billion.

The patents in question?

VirnetX claimed that Apple’s FaceTime, VPN on Demand and iMessage features infringe four patents related to secure communications, claims that Apple denied.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for Apple to write that check:

For VirnetX, the jury verdict in its favor could be a short-lived victory. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has said the patents are invalid, in cases that are currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.

Piper Jaffray’s “Teens Survey” shows 82% of US teens currently own an iPhone

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Kif Leswing, Business Insider:

82% of teens of teens currently own an iPhone, according to Piper Jaffray’s “Teens Survey,” which questions thousands of kids across 40 states with an average age of 16.

That’s up from 78% in last fall, and it’s the highest percentage of teen iPhone ownership Piper’s seen in its survey.

iPhone ownership among teens could go even higher — 84% of teens say their next phone will be an iPhone.

That 82% number is up from about 60% four years ago. Slow and steady increase.

A cool skunkworks story from the days of Apple’s transition from 68K to PowerPC

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Ron Avitzur:

Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under unique circumstances.

I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.

I love this story. Ron kept showing up, determined to bring Graphing Calculator to life on the new (at the time) PowerPC chips. Be sure to read all the way down to the bet about being on the front page of the New York Times.

[H/T, @thisneedseditin]

Jean-Louis Gassée looks at Apple’s chip-flipping history, and the chance of an ARM Mac

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Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:

In 2008, for $278M, Apple acquires Palo Alto Semiconductor, a semiconductor design company. Less than a year after the iPhone starts shipping, the intent is clear: instead of buying off-the-shelf ARM chips, Apple wants to design its own processors for future iPhones.

And:

Compared to modest first-year iPhone sales, spending $278M to acquire Palo Alto Semiconductor looks out of proportion. And, of course, let’s not forget a context where Intel reigns supreme having just “captured” the Mac. As always, references to Apple’s “well-known” arrogance are at the ready: Who do these guys think they are, what do they know about microprocessor design and manufacturing?

This is a great read. There’s insight into Apple’s path from 68K to PowerPC, the PowerPC to Intel, with lots of links and backup detail. And then Jean-Louis moves on to the possibility of iOS running on an ARM-based Mac, with both the good and the bad implications.

UPDATE: I originally wrote about the possibility for a speed increase for the Xcode iOS simulator. I started a Twitter thread asking about this and the response was pretty much no, that the code will be native either way (currently x86 code, if ported, it’ll be native ARM code, only difference would be if the ARM processor was significantly faster than the original x86 processor.)

A sequence of intertwined commercials

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[VIDEO] I’m not sure how to react to this sequence of commercials (embedded in the main Loop post). But I do know I watched, transfixed, all the way to the end.

Do You Trust This Computer?

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[VIDEO] This is an incredible documentary. Insightful and entertaining. In a nutshell, it focuses on the technology we are building and both the positive and negative implications.

Take a minute to watch the trailer, embedded in the main Loop post. It’ll give you a sense of things. Watch all the way to the end.

If this does catch your interest, you can rent the full movie here, watch a few more clips there too. The full movie pops up on YouTube, but I suspect those views are all bootlegged. It’s $3.99 to rent, worth supporting the team that made it.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s left Facebook over data collection

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Woz/USA TODAY:

“Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and … Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this,” he said in an email to USA TODAY. “The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.”

Wozniak said he’d rather pay for Facebook than have his personal information exploited for advertising. And he heaped praise on Apple for respecting people’s privacy.

“Apple makes its money off of good products, not off of you,” Wozniak said. “As they say, with Facebook, you are the product.”

More shots fired. Is this a temporary tempest in a teapot, or will this wave of controversy cause real change?

Credit card signatures are about to become extinct in the U.S.

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Stacy Cowley, New York Times:

Credit card networks are finally ready to concede what has been obvious to shoppers and merchants for years: Signatures are not a useful way to prove someone’s identity. Later this month, four of the largest networks — American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa — will stop requiring them to complete card transactions.

Long outdated tech. Ridiculous that signature checking is still part of the system. Baffling that chip-embedded cards have only recently become a standard in the US.

Would love to see wider adoption of Apple Pay so we can get rid of the security risks that come with those pieces of plastic altogether.

Apple introduces iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus (PRODUCT)RED Special Edition

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Pretty, pretty phone. Just take a look at the pics. I would definitely love one of these.

There’s also a new (PRODUCT)RED iPhone X Leather Folio.

From Apple’s announcement:

A portion of proceeds for all (PRODUCT)RED purchases go directly to Global Fund HIV/AIDS grants that provide testing, counseling, treatment and prevention programs with a specific focus on eliminating transmission of the virus from mothers to their babies. Since partnering with (RED) in 2006, Apple has donated more than $160 million to the Global Fund, serving as the organization’s largest corporate donor.

Order online starting tomorrow, April 10th and in stores beginning Friday, April 13.

Twitter responds to dev outcry, delays June 19th deprecation date

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Yesterday, a group of developers put up a web site pointing out Twitter’s plans to deprecate streaming services, critical for third party Twitter apps (our post about this is here).

Following a wave of protest, from developers and users alike, Twitter responded in a series of tweets:

https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/982346370882461696

While I’m glad to see Twitter respond, I’ll be interested to see the response from Twitter devs. Is this simply delaying the end, or is Twitter’s announced Accounts Activity API an adequate solution to keep third party Twitter apps in the game?

The looming end for third party Twitter apps

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Apps of a Feather (group post from 3rd party Twitter app developers):

After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:

  • Push notifications will no longer arrive
  • Timelines won’t refresh automatically

If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.

We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We’ve been waiting for more than a year.

Read the whole piece for details. I can’t wrap my head around Twitter’s thinking here. Is it so expensive to support third party developers, so expensive to maintain a native Mac Twitter client?

Third party Twitter clients bring choice, robustness to the Twitterverse. Third party Twitter clients also bring inclusiveness. Eliminating this community, in my opinion, sends a terrible message. These are the folks who breathed life into Twitter in the first place. I suspect none of them got rich doing this, that their efforts were, in a large part, a labor of love.

Leaving these developers unsupported, and leaving them hanging, just seems plain wrong.

A peek at the future of AR

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When I saw the video in the tweet embedded in the main Loop post, I felt, for the first time, like I’d seen a realistic peek at the future of augmented reality. This is not a game, this is something that I’d see as incredibly useful on a day-to-day basis.

Question: Will this future come with ads? Privacy?

Apple has an iOS gesture dilemma

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Tom Warren, The Verge:

For the longest time, pressing the home button on an iPad or iPhone was the fail-safe way to take you back to Apple’s grid of iOS apps. That changed with the all-screen iPhone X. A swipe up from the bottom is the new home gesture (which also unlocks the device) on Apple’s flagship phone, but that same gesture brings up the dock on the iPad. If, like me, you switch between the two devices fairly regularly throughout the day, then it takes a few minutes to adjust your muscle memory each time you switch.

An interesting issue. Same issue with Control Center.

To me, this is a migration issue, as iOS deals with the move from hardware with Home buttons to those without, the move from no Face ID to iOS devices with.

Spend a minute scrolling through the animated GIFs in Tom’s article. The confusion is clear.

Rollup of comments about rumored modular Mac Pro

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Michael Tsai doing his usual excellent job gathering comments and links relevant to the rumored 2019 Mac Pro. Two things stand out, though all are interesting:

This detailed story from TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Matthew Panzarino. From the story:

I was invited back to Apple to talk to the people most responsible for shepherding the renewed pro product strategy. John Ternus, vice president of Hardware Engineering, Tom Boger, senior director of Mac Hardware Product Marketing, Jud Coplan, director of Video Apps Product Marketing and Xander Soren, director of Music Apps Product Marketing.

The interviews and demos took place over several hours, highlighting the way that Apple is approaching upgradability, development of its pro apps and, most interestingly, how it has changed its process to help it more fully grok how professionals actually use its products.

A great read.

And this comment, at the end of Tsai’s rollup, from John Gruber’s take:

Sure, I wish the new Mac Pro were coming sooner. But overall this story is fantastic news for pro users — it shows Apple not only cares about the pro market, but that they’ve changed course and decided that the best way to serve pros is to work with them hand in hand.

That sums it up for me. I’m glad Apple has seen the light, is focused on bring us a new Mac Pro. Also glad they are taking the time to get it right, bring us something that will be worthy of the Pro moniker.

I do get the frustration of people who would prefer that Apple ship an upgradeable box (basically, an officially blessed Hackintosh), so they’d have something today. But that’s not Apple’s way.

Interesting, too, that Apple has parted the curtains enough to reveal plans for a product that may not ship until next December, 2019, 20 months from now.

How the new 9.7-inch iPad stacks up against the iPad Pro

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Chance Miller does a nice job walking through the differences between the new education iPad and the iPads Pro. I spent a few minutes on Apple’s web site to pull down some specs comparing the low-end 12.9″ iPad Pro and the low-end 9.7″ iPad:

The lowest end 12.9″ iPad Pro:

  • A10X Fusion chip
  • Retina, ProMotion, True Tone display
  • 12MP camera
  • 4K video recording
  • Smart connector, Bluetooth
  • 64GB
  • WiFi only
  • $799

The lowest end education 9.7″ iPad:

  • A10 chip
  • Retina display
  • 8MP camera
  • 1080p video recording
  • Bluetooth
  • 32GB
  • WiFi only
  • $329

Interesting to me that the iPad Mini 4 is $399, no Apple Pencil, runs an A8 chip.

Why the next Mac processor transition won’t be like the last two

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Jason Snell, Macworld:

This week’s report from Bloomberg that Apple is planning on moving the Mac to its own chips starting in 2020 is the culmination of years of growing speculation about the future of the Mac. I’ve been impressed by Apple’s use of ARM chips in new Macs while being skeptical about the prospects of a full transition.

But if we accept the Bloomberg report—and it’s from reporter Mark Gurman’s sources, which are generally excellent—it’s time to shift from speculating about whether or not Apple would do this and start to analyze why the company would make this move, and what form the transition might take.

Thoughtful piece by Jason Snell. Definitely worth reading.

Obviously, this post is based on speculation. But, as Jason says, Mark Gurman has an excellent track record. The question of why Apple would do this is an obvious one. If this is Apple’s plan, no one outside the company can answer it. But two things spring to mind for me.

First, moving the Mac to a chipset that they design and build would give them that much more control over the full stack. Less reliance on outside vendors, the ability to create a more efficient and more powerful set of devices.

Second, moving the Mac to the same chipset as the iPad would (and this is way out of my league conjecture here) make it that much easier to merge macOS and iOS, somewhere down the line.

Apple posts two new iPad how-to videos, maybe use this approach to sell Apple Pay?

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[VIDEO] Yesterday, Apple added to its long list of iPad how-to videos with the two embedded in the main Loop post.

This form has been around for a while now, and it is both simple and informative. Like the snappy Apple Pay ads we wrote about yesterday, these iPad videos are short, very focused, easy to follow, and charming.

I’d love to see Apple adopt these formats to show people real-life examples that demonstrate how easy Apple Pay is to use, how secure it is, then build a campaign to get that message in front of people, both as videos, and with still frame moments that can translate to print, web ads, and posters/billboards.

Just an idea. No matter, love the new iPad videos. Enjoy.

PS, here’s an old one from the same campaign that I also love. Shows the consistency, too.

Gruber, Apple Pay, and a dark pattern

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From this Wall Street Journal Journal article:

Users who opt not to input credit-card information for Apple Pay when setting up their phones now constantly see the red circle over their settings icon, indicating their setup is incomplete. Some users also periodically get notification reminders that go away only once they start the enrollment process.

To me, this is a dark pattern, something we happened to write about yesterday in this post, The terrible scourge of Dark Patterns.

John Gruber responds to Mickle’s WSJ article in this excellent Daring Fireball post:

Mickle has a point here. This does annoy people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to set up Apple Pay. There is a way to dismiss the red badge, but it’s not obvious how, because the button you have to tap says “Set Up Apple Pay”. (After that, you tap “Cancel” or “Set Up Later in Wallet”.) It is inscrutably counterintuitive to need to tap a button that says “Set Up Apple Pay” when your intention is to stop being nagged to set it up because you don’t want to set up Apple Pay.

A dark pattern, right? To me, if Apple is going to red dot persist you into signing up or not, better for the user to force the decision up front. In or out, your choice, thank you for your time.

Moving on, Gruber gets to the heart of the Apple Pay issue, adoption:

I do think Apple has a marketing problem with Apple Pay, though. I can tell from talking to family members that a lot of people just don’t see why they should try Apple Pay, because they have no idea how it works or why they’d want to use it. And I think they worry that because it’s new and sort of science-fiction-y it will make their credit card more likely to be hacked, when the truth is the opposite. I think Apple needs more ads that explain and demonstrate the convenience and indisputable security advantages of using Apple Pay instead of a credit card, and the extraordinary convenience of Apple Pay Cash. I can see how a lot of people think, “Eh, I’ll just keep using my credit card” when they’re paying for something in a retail store. But Apple Pay Cash could be enough to get these people to set up Apple Pay.

Coincidentally, Apple just posted a terrific series of Apple Pay ads (watch them here). I think John is spot-on here. The value of Apple Pay is wildly under-appreciated. Though Apple is pushing to brand Apple Pay as a cool shiny, it has not pushed across the message of Apple Pay’s safety, security. Possibly because safety and security is boring. It’s critically important, but it’s tough to make the point in any sort of entertaining way.

Google turning down support for goo.gl URL shortener in the coming weeks

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Google Developer Blog:

We’re turning down support for goo.gl over the coming weeks and replacing it with Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL). FDLs are smart URLs that allow you to send existing and potential users to any location within an iOS, Android or web app. We’re excited to grow and improve the product going forward. While most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.

And:

Starting April 13, 2018, anonymous users and users who have never created short links before today will not be able to create new short links via the goo.gl console. If you are looking to create new short links, we recommend you use Firebase Dynamic Links or check out popular services like Bitly and Ow.ly as an alternative.

If you have existing goo.gl short links, you can continue to use all features of goo.gl console for a period of one year, until March 30, 2019, when we will discontinue the console.

I can only imagine there’s a subtlety to this change, something that brings traffic through Google in a more useful manner than goo.gl did.

A possible clue:

URL Shortener has been a great tool that we’re proud to have built. As we look towards the future, we’re excited about the possibilities of Firebase Dynamic Links, particularly when it comes to dynamic platform detection and links that survive the app installation process.

Interesting. Have to learn more about Firebase Dynamic Links.

Four snappy new iPhone X Apple Pay ads

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[VIDEO] Have to say, Apple has crafted an excellent ad language here, telling a tiny story in a 10 second ad. Each one focuses on the iPhone X, Face ID verification, and Apple Pay, delivering the goods in a series of sound effect laden quick cuts.

Excellent work. See for yourself. All four ads embedded in the main Loop post.