Apple has great design is the biggest myth in technology today. The latest victim of this ideology comes in the form a remarkable report on the late Steve Jobs’s final project, still in production: a new, $5 billion Cupertino headquarters for Apple Inc.
And:
But if Apple designs at its best when attending closely to details like those revealed in the construction of its spaceship headquarters, then presumably the details of its products would stand out as worthy precedents. Yet, when this premise is tested, it comes up wanting. In truth, Apple’s products hide a shambles of bad design under the perfection of sleek exteriors.
There’s a lot more of this. Luckily, I will not have to take this article apart, point by point. Nick Heer, keeper of the blog Pixel Envy, does this job nicely, in a post titled Sufficiently Great.
Another common argument shared by some Apple critics is that the inability to deliver a killer product rests solely with Tim Cook. When we consider the two new lines of products Apple brought to market under Cook — Apple Watch and AirPods — I struggle to see how people could honestly believe Cook is failing.
And:
I have been wearing an Apple Watch every day since it first came out. Yet, whenever people ask me if I love it, I hesitate to say I do because it is hard to explain why. Apple Watch gives back what you put in. You need to invest some time in setting up your preferences when it comes to notifications, pick your apps, buy into fitness, and add your credit cards. Most importantly, you need to trust Apple Watch to pick up some of the responsibility you have given to your iPhone for so long. When you do so, Apple Watch becomes a trusted companion you will not easily go without.
And:
This is the slogan of Apple’s AirPod commercial and, if you ask anyone who has tried them, they will agree. The feeling of magic is not because the user is aware of Apple’s unique approach of having two separate streams of music play simultaneously into each AirPod. The magic is delivered as soon as you pair your AirPods by simply taking away any pain previously inflicted by Bluetooth-enabled headphones requiring you to pay attention to flashing colored lights while pressing odd buttons.
All solid takes. Apple products are at their bests when they focus on fit, finish, and fine details. For example, compare the AirPods pairing times with any other BlueTooth earphones. Apple clearly put a lot of work into the design of the W1 chip and pairing time, whittling it down to practically instantaneous.
Compare the AirPods pairing time to the BeatsX pairing time. BeatsX also uses the W1 chip, but is noticeably slower to pair. Not that BeatsX are slow, it’s that the AirPods are fast. Magically fast. And that’s the point.
Apple’s new BeatsX Earphones are now live in the Apple Store, both brick and mortar and online.
BeatsX are available in four colors: white, black, gray, and blue, all priced at $149.95.
The white and black models ship pretty much immediately. If I order them online today, I can have them by Tuesday for a $17 next day shipping charge, $19 if I want them before noon, or free two shipping if I am willing to wait until Wednesday. Obviously, depending where you live, your shipping charges may be different.
The gray and blue models are currently showing delivery dates of February 23-28 (13 to 18 days from now) with free two day shipping, one day sooner with the overnight shipping fees mentioned above.
As to reviews, Chance Miller, 9to5Mac did a nice job gathering a series of YouTube reviews comparing the BeatsX Earphones to the AirPods, looking at things like sound quality and fit.
If you are trying to choose between BeatsX and AirPods, watch the videos. Each has a slightly different take, as a whole they should help give you a sense of which appeals to you more.
Mobile apps like Apple News, SmartNews, Google News, and others may be your favorite news aggregators. But I have always been partial to Flipboard, the beautiful and clever app which started off six years ago as a way to turn social media posts into handsome magazine-like articles on iPads.
Now, Flipboard is launching a major redesign, version 4.0, which is built around “smart,” magazines on topics you choose, tailored using highly granular choices of subjects or sources, and automatically updated as relevant new content is published online.
I like the idea of Flipboard and have a couple of “magazines” of my own but I don’t seem to find the time to use the app the way it is intended. It just isn’t as compelling or full featured as I’d like it to be.
In 2016, photographer Vincent Tullo attended the 140th Westminster Dog Show. Photographing the behind-the-scenes action in stark black and white, Tullo artfully captured the triumph and the torment experienced by both the dogs and their human handlers.
In advance of the 2017 Westminster Dog Show, which begins Feb. 11, enjoy some of last year’s doggy drama.
I post this less about the dog show, which is great fun to watch and is on this weekend, and more about the choice of black and white for the photos. I love B&W photography but it doesn’t work in all situations. I think this is one of those times when it really doesn’t work.
If the music industry is indeed in turnaround, that’s in no small part due to the digital disrupter at No. 1, the live titan at No. 3, Alexa’s mastermind at No. 12 and the visionary label bosses, tech gurus, artist managers and media moguls (including 41 first-timers!) who comprise Billboard’s annual ranking of executive excellence.
Apple’s Eddy Cue, Jimmy Iovine, and Robert Kondrk are all tied at No. 4, while Larry Jackson and Bozoma Saint John are tied at No. 67.
This morning, a Russian forensics firm named Elcomsoft announced a way to extract years’ worth of web browsing records from Apple’s iCloud storage system, a method first reported by Forbes. Those records included site names, URLs, and when a given site was visited. Cleared browsing records are also visible in the records, although they are marked as “deleted” in the table. Mobile browsing records are also visible, although the sites themselves appear to be hashed in the most recent versions of iOS.
Wow. Looking forward to Apple’s official take on this.
Click through for a glimpse at the NeXT public offering application, the so-called Form S-1. The form is dated November 18th, 1996, about seven months before Steve Jobs came back to Apple.
If that IPO had gone through, the world might be a radically different place.
The way I read this, this is Samsung striking out on their own, moving to brand their own voice personality, apart from “OK Google”, and competing with Siri and Alexa (and to a lesser extent, Cortana). The main difference is, Apple and Amazon have complete control over the hardware on which their voice assistants run. Google is, at some level, dependent on third party hardware (thought Google Home and the Pixel phone are Google from the ground up). Samsung does control its hardware, but is dependent on Google for Android.
Bernard Desarnauts, writing about a Wristly panel of more than 2,400 Apple Watch users:
A majority of the panel members were checking their notifications via the watch regularly, which by definition means they’re not looking for that information on their phone.
And:
We found that an average Apple Watch user is using his or her iPhone quite a bit more than non-Apple Watch users.
Interesting. Here’s why:
This data point can be explained by the stage of market development, whereby an Apple Watch user is by definition among the power users of mobile.
Makes sense.
But what is insightful and somewhat contradictory to this data point is that those same Apple Watch owners open/pick up their iPhone at least 20 percent less than non-Apple Watch owners.
This quantifies the anecdotal reporting from our panel; wearing an Apple Watch helps reduce the number of notifications and interruptions from your iPhone, and helps users remain focused on what is happening in the moment.
And:
Our panel consistently shares high usage rate of Siri and the other voice capabilities of the Apple Watch. In early June, the survey measured 65 percent of the users reporting using it more than expected. And we recently noted that Voice to Text was the second favorite way to respond to incoming messages. It also regularly garners rave reviews from our panelists when asked about their experience with Siri on the Apple Watch.
In a nutshell, the Apple Watch is doing what its supposed to, offering a less socially jarring way for users to keep connected with their incoming notifications.
Two anecdotes from the study:
“Walking down the street carrying a cup of coffee in each hand, I was able to raise my wrist slightly and say ‘Hey Siri call…’ without having to set the coffees down and without having to touch the watch whatsoever!”
“Scheduled a haircut on my iPhone while picking up lunch…I lifted up my wrist, ‘Hey Siri…’ and it was done. Love those little moments.”
I’ve had this same experience. Apple Watch lets me keep my iPhone in my pocket and gives me hands free access to Siri. These points may be obvious to anyone with an Apple Watch, but interesting to see these results quantified.
John Voorhees, MacStories, shows off the specifics of Microsoft’s just-released support for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar. Currently, that support is only available via Microsoft’s Office Insider beta program, which you can sign up for here.
Virtual reality, no doubt, represents the future. There are products on the market that work well. At the low end, stick a phone inside a cardboard rig and you are immersed, slightly, in a low-res, virtual world.
At the higher end, you don headgear that is midway between goggles and a motorcycle helmet, connected by a braid of cables to a box connected to a high-end gaming rig, usually running some version of Windows. Typically, there are special gloves, with built in trigger buttons, as well as sensors deployed on stands to detect movement of your head and hands. You’ll need to clear out some space to move around, especially if you’ll be swinging a sword or punching a monster. And you’ll probably want some friends around, both for camaraderie and to help keep you from knocking over the sensor stands and other items, and to keep you from falling and hurting yourself.
This high end VR is really what VR is all about. Well done VR is truly a breathtaking, magical experience. But by its nature, well done VR is just not portable, and not particularly affordable.
Will these problems be sorted out? Will high end VR come down in price? Of course. But it’s nowhere near that yet.
“There’d be some days where I wouldn’t give a demo at all because people didn’t want to,” said one worker at a Best Buy in Texas who asked to remain anonymous. Another worker from California said that Oculus software bugs would often render his demo headsets unusable.
Virtual Reality has not yet found its killer app, and the marketing has not given people a reason to try it out in person. VR is still in an early adopter phase.
Then there’s this story about Magic Leap engineers scrambling to cadge together some kind of demo in time for a major Board meeting. From the story:
The prototype will be presented to board members, and sources say the meeting is being viewed as a milestone in the product’s development — a chance to prove that Magic Leap can shrink its technology to fit inside the smaller form factor that will be released to the public. They say the demo is currently in “decent” shape.
But as recently as January, the glasses prototype that is supposed to represent Magic Leap’s all-in-one product prototype is nonfunctioning and empty, according to people who have seen presentations from Magic Leap.
And:
The Information reported in December that a prototype of the “PEQ” device that Magic Leap’s CEO showed a reporter was hollow, and that the company gave its demos through a headset hooked up to a desktop computer, raising questions about whether Magic Leap’s technology could be sufficiently miniaturized and productized to fulfill the company’s promises.
I love the Magic Leap concept, and I think they will get there. Eventually.
Which brings me to my final point. Apple is not late to this game. Apple does well when the core components for a technology are mature, on the verge of becoming commodities. With the components ready for mass production, Apple builds around that technology, masterfully designing an experience superior to anything already in the marketplace.
My 2 cents? VR will succeed. No doubt. But VR will be ready for the masses when the components are miniaturized to the point where they become portable and can be mass produced. And that’s when Apple’s time will come.
UPDATE: Occurs to me I focused on VR here, when Apple might go straight to AR. But my thinking remains the same. Though augmented reality can be lighter than VR, both are rooted in similar technology, both require significant horsepower. I don’t think the hardware for either is mature enough to judge yet.
The fire broke out not on the production line itself but in a part of the facility used for waste, including faulty batteries, said Samsung SDI spokesman Shin Yong-doo. He added that most of the factory was running as normal.
A Samsung factory fire caused by faulty batteries… Priceless.
Every quarter, there’s a slew of headlines on this basis, usually based on analysis from Cannacord Genuity. The big flaw in this analysis (and the reason I inserted a “not really” into the headline) is that it only looks at those players that publicly report profits from a smartphone unit, plus Apple.
As the article points out, the “survey” of six “major” smartphone vendors includes the #1 and #2 but also BlackBerry and Microsoft, which each shipped well under a million smartphones last quarter. It entirely leaves out the third, fourth, and fifth largest smartphone vendors (Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo) and other big names from the top 10 like Lenovo and Xiaomi.
The headline gets reported every quarter but Dawson cautions against taking it at face value.
All images of public-domain artworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection — about 375,000 — are now free for anyone to use however they may please.
The museum announced on Tuesday that it had changed its open access policy to allow free, unrestricted use of any images of artworks in the public domain, using the license designation Creative Commons Zero, known as CC0.
This could be an incredible resource for designers and art students alike.
New York Times Co., looking for ways to persuade readers to pay for news, is working with Spotify Ltd. to give new digital subscribers to the newspaper free access to the world’s largest music-streaming service.
Readers who buy one-year online subscriptions to the Times will also get unlimited access to Spotify’s premium service, which costs $120 annually, the companies said Wednesday.
And:
The news-and-music subscription costs $5 a week, a 20 percent discount on the retail price for an all-access digital subscription to the Times.
A solid deal, if you want the All Access Times subscription, which includes insider access (special features) as well as a bonus subscription you can share with a friend. If you just want the regular digital access, you are better off finding the 50% discount offer on the web and subscribing to Spotify (or Apple Music) separately.
Either way, subscribe to some source of real news. Keep the news sites alive.
Since the birth of the industrial revolution, tricksters have tried to sell the world on the impossible. But this one has the blessing of physicists at Berkely and others have been able to replicate their findings.
Now, in a paper published this week, Norman Yao at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have revealed a blueprint for making a time crystal. The recipe has already been followed by two teams.
For Yao’s time crystal, an external force – like the pulse of a laser – flips the magnetic spin of one ion in a crystal, which then flips the spin of the next, and so forth, setting the system into a repeating pattern of periodic motion.
Stay skeptical, but with just a touch of hope and wonder.
They offer a huge assortment of fonts, all licensed for free commercial use, with a nice set of categories and search engine. And free…though the tradeoff is a fairly heavy advertising load.
And:
Font Squirrel not only has a great collection of fonts, but they offer a free web font generator. Using the generator, you can create fonts that are embedded in your page, so that they’re available even when users don’t have those fonts installed locally.
There’s more to Font Squirrel. Definitely worth a look.
Visual and user interface designer Max Rudberg compares the touch down state (the visual change when you press, but before you release, a button) in Apple Watch, Android, and iOS. There are excellent animated GIFs for each example.
Max makes his case well. By comparison, iOS does feel a bit stiff.
iOS comes with a built in magnifying glass, perfect for reading fine print, clarifying small detail. The linked post walks through the setup and use. Nicely done.
A developer-only preview of what would become the macOS Sierra 10.12.4 software update references a total of eight next-generation MacBook Pro models with the latest Kaby Lake processors from Intel.
Lower power consumption and, more importantly, support for 32GB of RAM. Interesting and inevitable.
UPDATE: A little birdie tells me that Kaby Lake’s built-in memory controller does not support 32GB RAM. So the move to Kaby Lake does not necessarily mean we’ll see Macs with 32GB RAM without the addition of a separate memory controller.
Apple Inc. has hired Timothy D. Twerdahl, the former head of Amazon.com Inc.’s Fire TV unit, as a vice president in charge of Apple TV product marketing and shifted the executive who previously held the job to a spot negotiating media content deals.
The moves suggest a renewed focus on the Apple TV and on providing more content for the device, an effort that has been stalled in the past by failed negotiations.
This feels like a recognition that the Apple TV was stalled and a change to get things moving again.
The way this reads, Apple TV is getting a product leader who reports to Phil Schiller, while Eddy Cue’s group keeps control over dealmaking. I wonder if this means the Apple TV product will get more of a chance to be a good product, separate from Apple’s content deals. Too often the Apple TV has seemed like an empty box for Apple’s content deals (or would-be content deals), rather than a product that was striving to be the best it could be.
The Apple TV, while somewhat frustrating, has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, this is an area where Apple’s competition—from Amazon, Roku, and Google—is extremely strong, and with products that cost a fraction of what the Apple TV costs. The Apple TV’s strongest advantages right now are artificial ones, namely exclusive access to iTunes content and AirPlay. It’s not a bad box, but it needs to be better. Maybe this change is a sign that Apple knows that, too?
As much as I may disagree with Apple Music’s focus, I do agree with this.
Yet despite competition from Spotify, Jay Z’s Tidal, and others, Iovine doesn’t believe that streaming has to become a winner-take-all proposition.
“Not if streaming is done right,” he says. What “right” means is that each service is culturally different, he explains, so that each has a different feel. “Yeah, they all have the same catalog, but what we’re doing is we’re just building on top of that. That’s where the personality and the feel will come from.”
I only wish that Apple’s culture included less pandering to celebrities and more focus on the user experience, as well as including a wider variety of musicians and genres they are willing to promote. I doubt that will happen, but one can hope.
Nope, you don’t have to settle for itty-bitty text on your iPhone screen, nor must you deal with buttons that don’t look anything like buttons. Once you know which settings to change, you can boost the size of on-screen text on your iPhone or iPad, make words a bit more bold, zoom in with a virtual magnifying glass, warm up—or cool off—Night Shift, and more.
As I get older and my eyesight gets worse, I use some of these tips. They’re not just for the visually disabled – they’re for us “old folks” too.
Stung by criticism that Twitter has allowed harassment and abuse to spread unchecked and under growing pressure from Wall Street to deliver growth, CEO Jack Dorsey has pledged “a completely new approach to abuse.” Twitter’s vice president of engineering Ed Ho said last week the company will keep working on combating abuse “until we’ve made a significant impact that people can feel.”
The pledges have been met with skepticism from critics. Twitter is out to prove that it’s taking safety on the platform seriously with a new set of updates that begin rolling out Tuesday. The changes will give users more control over what they see on the social media service, Twitter says.
The “again” part of the headline is key. Twitter has let this problem go on far too long and has done far too little to combat it. We’ll see if these new measures actually do anything.
