Business

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jason Snell, Macworld:

Sure, a few of us lucky souls were able to listen to a HomePod at Apple’s developer conference, but nobody outside of Apple has talked to one or picked one up. At the risk of stating the obvious, that’s because this is a product that’s not finished yet. Apple doesn’t want to publicly commit to a feature and then realize it can’t ship it; the product as the company conceives it today may not be the product that ends up in customers’ hands in December.

Lots of detail on what we know and what we still don’t know. Good read.

target=”_blank”>here, but this on the Mac Mini stuck out:

And while they even updated the venerable MacBook Air (a bit), the Mac Mini is sitting there in its ancient and increasingly “what about this then?” glory. I have to admit, I can only think of one reason for this: that they still plan to replace the Mac Mini down the road, and that it’ll be done with a lower end version of the Mac Pro. Here’s hoping, because I’d buy that thing in a femtosecond. But for now, the Mac Mini continues to be an enigma of “why is is not updated and still on the price list?” — I’m a little surprised it didn’t get a CPU refresh with everything else here, but I’ll bet our friend the Thermal Limit problem is the reason, and replacing it will require the stuff being done on the Mac Pro. At least, I hope so.

The Mac Mini does have an audience, it’s throw in the suitcase portable, and is Mac Pro-level long in the tooth. Here’s hoping we see a new one sometime soon.

Greg Barbosa, 9to5Mac:

With iOS 11, users will gain the ability to adjust the AirPods’ double-tap action with new control options.

Changing the double-tap functionality on the AirPods is as simple as jumping into the AirPod’s Bluetooth settings. Before iOS 11, users were simply stuck between decided whether the double-tap activated Siri, or Play/Paused audio. On iOS 11, Apple has given more control to the AirPods with the introduction of Next Track, Previous Track, and Off options.

This is a smart add for Apple. I can control volume (something I do rarely) from my Apple Watch, and skip to next track (something I do all the time) directly from my AirPods. Perfect.

Serenity Caldwell, iMore:

When iOS 11 comes out in the fall, users will be able to turn on “Type to Siri” in their accessibility settings, which will let you write your commands to Siri, rather than shout them into space.

As of now, Type to Siri is an accessibility feature: It’s designed for folks who may not be able to speak their queries and need a keyboard (or other switch control-based device) to do so, and a huge boon for them, too.

But even those without need for accessibility features may love this feature — Google’s Assistant offers both a text and type interface, allowing for quick and quiet answers to questions when a typical voice query won’t do, and a similar Siri option should prove very helpful for a variety of folks. The feature will also be available for macOS High Sierra when it launches in the fall, as well.

It’ll be interesting to see if this feature is exposed in other ways. For example, would I be able to write a script in High Sierra to programmatically interface with Siri?