Business

Search ads start showing up in iOS App Store, early examples not encouraging

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Ben Lovejoy, writing for 9to5mac:

Apple recently started offering developers the opportunity to buy search ads in the App Store, allowing their apps to be shown when users search for particular keywords. Those ads have now started showing up for U.S. users.

The theory is that it allows deserving apps from smaller developers to be seen by more people, giving them a better shot at competing with the big boys. Early examples, though, are not encouraging.

For example, search for Pokémon Go, and you get an ad for Catch ’em, an app which appears to be just copying the idea rather than bringing anything new to the party (below). Other examples posted similarly seem to show ads that are just hijacking popular search terms with me-too apps.

Is there a balance here? Are there stories out there of developers of legitimate apps (as opposed to copycat/land-grab apps) who have benefited from these ads?

Too early to truly draw any conclusions. I would hate to see the app store turn into a steady, muddied stream of ads. That would, indeed, suck.

Apple has unceremoniously removed Dash from the App Store

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Dash is an off-line documentation browser, popular with developers. This morning, it was gone.

From the Dash for macOS blog:

Earlier today, Apple cancelled my developer account and has removed Dash from the App Store.

What Happened? I don’t know.

Read the post for details. But in a nutshell, Apple pulled the app and canceled the Dash developer account, sending an email saying “the account was terminated due to fraudulent conduct”.

This is a story with two major paths: Either the developer did something to deserve the rug being pulled out from under, something worthy of their developer credentials being cancelled. Or there’s a colossal misunderstanding here. I suspect there’s more to this than meets the eye.

Either way, don’t think this is the way this should have played out.

If Steve Jobs walked into Apple Computer now, which products would he nix?

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Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death. A number of tributes to Steve popped up, including this recode post pulled together by Dan Frommer, highlighting interviews Steve did with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at the All Things Digital conference from 2003-2010.

Another bit of writing I enjoyed was this Medium Post entitled We miss Steve Jobs, by Christina Goodwin, Samantha Chaves, and Michael Histen.

One particular question from this post really resonated with me:

If Steve Jobs walked into Apple Computer now, which products would he nix? What’s the “one thing” Apple does well? I don’t have a good answer. That scares the shit out of me.

When Steve first came back to Apple, he famously drew a simple two-by-two grid, labeling the columns consumer and professional, and the rows desktop and portable. He used that grid to winnow the Mac product line down to four models, greatly simplifying the supply chain and sales process and making life significantly less confusing for the consumer.

Would that approach work in today’s Apple? Apple is not the same company that Steve came home to. Apple is now a dominant player, not a straggler searching for its identity. Apple has a vision associated with each product, each product has a distinct position in the ecosystem. And Apple is way profitable.

That said, there are some cloudy points. Which Mac is the light, low-cost laptop champion? Is it the MacBook? The MacBook Air? Is there a future for the Mac Pro?

And where is Apple heading with its connectors? Is MagSafe dead? Is USB-C the power connector of the future? Is the 3.5mm jack going to be removed from future laptops?

Will Apple fix iTunes? Will the Mac App Store and iOS App Store ever play by the same rules (you can sell an app outside the Mac App Store, not so iOS)? Are we heading towards a macOS/iOS singularity?

Just some food for thought.

Yahoo’s official response to Reuters spy report

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Sam Biddle, writing for The Intercept:

After Tuesday’s revelatory story by Reuters’ Joseph Menn that exposed an apparent vast, secret, government-ordered email surveillance program at Yahoo, the company has issued a brief statement through Joele Frank, a public relations firm.

Here’s a link to the Reuters article in question.

Yahoo’s email statement, via Jacob Silber of the Joele Frank communications firm:

Good morning –

We are reaching out on behalf of Yahoo regarding yesterday’s Reuters article. Yahoo said in a statement:

“The article is misleading. We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.”

Best,

The Joele Frank Team

Sam Biddle:

This is an extremely carefully worded statement, arriving roughly 20 hours after the Reuters story first broke. That’s a long time to craft 29 words.

And:

It would mean a lot more for this denial to come straight from the keyboard of a named executive at Yahoo—perhaps Ron Bell, the company’s general counsel—rather than a “strategic communications firm.”

This feels like a disaster for Yahoo.

Google Assistant will live in three places, each with different features

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[See original post for VIDEO]

Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge:

Nailing down exactly what the Google Assistant is capable of can be strangely difficult right now. That’s because Google currently has three different ways to use the Google Assistant. Google says it’s the same Assistant in each place, but it can (and can’t) do different things depending on where you use it.

  • Google Assistant on Google Home (the new speaker)
  • Google Assistant on Pixel (the new phones)
  • Google Assistant on Allo (the new-ish chat app)

At its core, Google Assistant is a model of you, with threads through your life, your calendar, your photos and other media, your travel plans, food ordering habits, etc. Each of these examples is a window into your Google model and a well-defined read and write access to that model.

One of the challenges to creating this sort of model is the ability to keep that model online and distributed. Ideally, you’d be online with a super-fast net connection with secure, unlimited storage at all times. That would mean storing your model in a central repository and giving access to the various assistants as needed.

But real life imposes limits such as limited net access, limited storage, and different form factors. Getting all these pieces to play together is a daunting challenge.

Notably, Apple has been meditating on this problem since the early days of the Mac. Check out this Knowledge Navigator video from 1987. This is an incredibly complex problem, and solutions are still in their infancy. Fascinating to watch this unfold.

Apple discontinues third-generation Apple TV, removes it from online store

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Chance Miller, writing for 9to5mac:

The gradual death of the third-gen Apple TV is continuing this evening, as Apple has officially discontinued the device. In an email sent out today to employees and education partners, obtained by 9to5Mac, Apple confirmed that it is discontinuing the device, shifting its focus entirely to the fourth-gen, tvOS-powered model and possibly a new model.

I have a third-gen Apple TV and it still works well. Perfect solution to add Netflix, Hulu, etc. to a lower-use TV. If I could get another one at a heavily discounted price, I’d snap it up in a heartbeat.

One thing Google’s Pixel offers that Apple doesn’t

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From the fine print at the bottom of Google’s official Pixel Phone page:

Unlimited backups for photos and videos taken with your Pixel. Requires Google account. Data rates may apply.

There are a number of fronts in the battle between Google and Apple for the hearts and minds of smartphone users. One well-defined line in the sand is for media storage. Do you pay a monthly fee for an iCloud account to store your photos, as well as updates and backups?

Google has thrown down the gauntlet, offering free unlimited media storage for Pixel buyers. This move will be difficult for other Android phone manufacturers to match, since the photos go to Google’s servers, even if the phone is made by, say, Samsung.

Apple does control the entire path from camera to photo storage. The question is, will Apple address this challenge directly?

Hey Apple, what’s the scheduling conflict?

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Philip Elmer-DeWitt, writing for Apple 3.0:

Apple has moved up by two days its final quarterly earnings call of fiscal 2016 due to what Apple Investor Relations calls a “scheduling conflict.”

What’s the conflict? Why Tuesday Oct. 25 and not Thursday Oct. 27? Apple didn’t say, and reporters’ inquiries (including mine) were met with silence.

And, among the rumors encountered for the change:

The best guess for the date shift, in my book, was also the most popular:

A launch event for new Macs

Just food for thought, here are the October events since 2010:

  • Oct 20, 2010, Wednesday – Back to the Mac
  • Oct 4, 2011, Tuesday – iPhone 4s
  • Oct 23, 2012, Tuesday – iMac, iPad 4th Generation, iPad mini, Mac mini and MacBook Pro 13 inch
  • Oct 22, 2013, Tuesday – iPad Air, iPad mini with Retina display
  • Oct 16, 2014, Thursday – iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 3, 27-inch iMac

Notably, there was no October event last year.

That new Google phone isn’t water resistant, and I’m sure you can guess why

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At the heart of Google’s new marketing campaign is a razor sharp jab at Apple:

3.5mm headphone jack satisfyingly not new

That headphone jack is an ingress point for water. Obviously, that’s a problem that can be solved (as Samsung does), but Google chose not to, and made a point of chastising Apple for going down that road.

Google is pouring on the marketing here. Spend a few minutes with the official Pixel page. Is this hype, or is this progress?

UPDATE: This is one of those posts where I just shouldn’t have hit enter. Lots of pushback, deservedly so, but we don’t delete posts, so all I can do is say I’ll try to do better.

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.

A song created by artificial intelligence

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[VIDEO]: Chris Mench, writing for Complex:

Scientists at Sony’s CSL research lab unveiled a new track called “Daddy’s Car.” If that sounds bizarre to you, you’re not wrong. Although the song sounds like any run-of-the-mill track, it’s actually created by the artificial intelligence software Flow Machines. The software draws from a massive database of songs to compose its music, combining small elements of many tracks to create new compositions. All someone has to do to create a song is choose a style of music or artist from the database and the software will make the score for them. The most represented genres are jazz and pop, but all types of music are represented. In this case, a musician named Benoît Carré wrote the lyrics and arranged the music.

The song is embedded in our main post. Take a listen. Even if this style of music is not your cup of tea, set that aside and listen to the changes and harmonies. There’s a lot of derived musical techniques at work, all playing very softly together. No edge, no instrumental expression, but lots of vocal shifts. I’m hearing Beatles and XTC.

To me, this is a harbinger of things to come. Our robotic overlords have their sights set on our music streaming revenue.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Written by

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?

Apple buying McLaren would make perfect sense

Written by

Jordan Golson, writing for The Verge:

An acquisition would give Apple a small but significant carmaker that has enormous amounts of technological expertise in building drivetrains, vehicle control systems, and navigating complicated supplier-OEM relationships. McLaren also has significant experience working with advanced materials like carbon composites, aluminum, and carbon fiber.

It’s a small but important firm, best known for its sports cars — it sold 1,654 road cars in 2015 — and its Formula One team. But the company is much more than just a car manufacturer. The 5,000 employees of the McLaren Technology Group work across six different divisions including automotive, racing, marketing, and as an automotive supplier for race teams and high-end performance cars.

McLaren has quietly been growing its consulting division as well. McLaren Applied Technologies works with firms across a number of industries — both automotive and otherwise — to provide R&D and technology expertise behind the scenes. McLaren is privately owned and one of the smallest independent carmakers, making an acquisition logistically simpler.

I am a big fan of McLaren and of Formula One. McLaren represents automotive state of the art, one of the few firms with the technological prowess to compete at the Formula One level, no easy task. Formula One lays out strict regulations for the design of every competing car, and changes those rules every season, requiring competitors to redesign a race car, sometimes from scratch, every year.

On the flip side, McLaren makes and sells vehicles you can buy (if you’ve got the wherewithal) and drive on the street. They’ve got invaluable experience with the automotive supply chain, and they have the kind of industry relationships that an Apple auto effort would benefit from.

I’ve long said supported the notion of Apple buying Formula One, en toto, purely as a brand play and investment. But buying McLaren makes even more sense. They’d have cherry picked just the right player, a rising star in the Formula One world with an old school brand.