By John Gruber

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Fitting Facts to the Narrative at The Washington Post ★

From a Washington Post story headlined “Apple Is Behind in AI and Killed Its Self-Driving Car Project. What’s Next?”:

The company’s Greater China region, which encompasses mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, has long been one of Apple’s most crucial growth zones. But growing pressure from a handful local rivals — including Shenzhen-based Huawei, which surmounted U.S. sanctions aimed at slowing its advance in late 2023 by producing a smartphone with a domestically made processor — cut sharply into Apple’s market share in the region earlier this year.

Data from market research firm Counterpoint Research indicated that Apple’s sales in China dipped by nearly 20 percent in the first quarter of 2024, a shift that senior research analyst Ivan Lam attributed partially to “Huawei’s comeback.”

The full scope of the company’s decline in China became clear Thursday, when Apple reported an 8 percent revenue dip compared to a year earlier.

It’s inexplicable that the Post included a paragraph with projections from Counterpoint claiming iPhone sales in China were down 20 percent even after Apple reported its actual results for the quarter. Jason Snell, over at Six Colors:

Finally, I particularly enjoyed the exchange between Wells Fargo’s Aaron Rakers and Cook in which Rakers asked Cook to explain Apple’s results compared to the data reported by independent research groups that suggested iPhone sales were falling apart in China. Apple’s actual numbers weren’t that bad, and in fact, Apple trumpeted how well the iPhone was going in urban China.

“I can’t address the data points,” Cook said. “I can only address what our results are, and you know, we did accelerate last quarter. And iPhone grew in mainland China, so that’s what the results were. I can’t bridge to numbers we didn’t come up with.”

That’s about as savage a shade-throwing as you’ll get on an Apple analyst call.

iPhone grew in mainland China last quarter but even after Apple announced that — in a legally-binding context — they went with made-up projections from Counterpoint to fit their narrative that Apple is in trouble.

While I’m being grumpy, I’ll even take issue with the notion — which the Post leads with in its headline — that Apple is “behind in AI”? It is true that Apple doesn’t offer an AI chat product like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, or Google’s Gemini. But do we expect Apple ever to offer such a project? Apple doesn’t have a web search engine but no one is arguing that Apple is “behind” on search. (App Store search results quality is another issue.) Apple doesn’t offer turnkey cloud computing services like AWS or Google Cloud either. Are they “behind” on that? When it comes to the products Apple already sells, how are they “behind on AI”? Are iPhone users missing out on AI features available only to Android users? No. Are MacBook users missing out because Apple hasn’t added a dedicated AI key to their keyboards?

I get it that people see AI as a frontier that is transforming the industry, and Apple hasn’t revealed any new plans or features yet. But I’d say Apple is silent on AI, not behind. When iOS and Mac users are missing out on features that are only available on other platforms, that’s when I’d say Apple is behind.

Logitech’s Mouse Software Now Includes ChatGPT Support, Adds Janky ‘ai_overlay_tmp’ Directory to Users’ Home Folders ★

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

I know AI is all the rage right now and having a deal to bring ChatGPT into your software is trendy, but including a tool like this in what is basically a mouse driver is ridiculous. I’m not opposed to using AI in software. I’m just opposed to when it shows up as an unexpected, poorly-implemented feature in software that doesn’t need it.

At least Logitech’s Mac developers did such a bad job with it, that it was easy to spot.

Logitech committed a bunch of sins with this mouse driver. First, it just seems ridiculous to add an AI prompt feature to a mouse driver. Second, no matter what the feature, it’s wrong to add a top-level folder to a user’s home directory — and it’s especially wrong to give such a folder a dumb name like “ai_overlay_tmp”.

It’s more common for poorly-programmed Mac software to create such folders with a leading dot in their name, a convention that tells the Finder to treat them as “invisible”. But that’s poor form on MacOS too. Support folders should be organized in standard sub-folders inside the user’s Library folder. Open Terminal and type ls -a at the root of your home folder and you’ll probably see a lot of detritus that ought to be inside your Library folder.

Hackett has switched from Logitech’s mouse software to the excellent SteerMouse, an excellent $20 mouse driver that supports just about every mouse in the world. I’ve been using and wholeheartedly recommending SteerMouse for nearly 20 years.

It’s also the case that even with a third-party mouse, you might not want any third-party driver software at all. MacOS’s built-in mouse software recognizes most mice. I rely on SteerMouse not because my mouse has lots of buttons (it doesn’t), but to get fine-grained control over the speed and acceleration of the pointer. SteerMouse lets me set my mouse to go way, way faster than the built-in Mouse panel in Settings does — something I’ve done for decades to reduce wrist fatigue and pain. I can move my pointer from corner to corner across my Studio Display by moving my mouse just a few centimeters.

The problem is, many people — perhaps especially people whose computing experience was forged on Windows — wrongly assume that if you buy a Brand X mouse, you need to install Brand X’s software to use it. For Logitech mouse users, that means AI software they neither want nor need running in the background, and an ugly-named temp folder stinking up their home directory like a squatter.

Yours Truly on ‘First Ones’ ★

Brian McCullough at the Techmeme Ride Home podcast has a new YouTube series, “First Ones”, where he asks his guests for their firsts — first computer, first movie in a theater, etc. Guests so far, in addition to me, include Guy Kawasaki, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, Ed Zitron, and more. Very fun.

Apple Watch Ultra’s Best Feature: Battery Life ★

Jason Aten, writing for Inc.:

I don’t run marathons or climb mountains or dive. I don’t often find myself in remote locations in precarious situations. I joked that, for me, the Apple Watch Ultra will be the perfect thing to wear while other people are working out. Like, for example, when I’m keeping track of my daughter’s cross-country race splits.

When I first started wearing the Ultra, I was sure the most useful feature was what Apple calls the Action Button. I still think the ability to assign a dedicated button to things like starting a workout or a stopwatch is great, but there’s a far better feature, and the most surprising thing is that Apple isn’t making a big deal of it at all.

That’s the fact that the Apple Watch Ultra has ridiculous battery life, at least by Apple Watch standards. Yes, Apple has said that the Ultra has the best battery life of any Apple Watch. But Apple is dramatically underselling the battery life on its new flagship wearable, claiming it gets 36 hours. In my experience, it got more than 60 hours.

Two thoughts about this:

• Perhaps Apple underplays the Ultra’s battery life so as not to make the battery life on the regular Series 9 models look bad? From my experience while reviewing the original Ultra, I could get two days of battery life on a single charge even while wearing it to sleep.

• The battery life on all Apple Watch models from the last few years offers a stark contrast to the dedicated AI gadgets we’re starting to see, like Humane’s AI Pin and Rabbit’s R1 handheld dingus. It goes under-remarked-upon that Apple is really really good at making computer hardware, and particularly at making small computer hardware.

Boring News: Vision Pro Sales Are Going Just About as Expected ★

Ming-Chi Kuo, two weeks ago:

Apple has cut its 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400–450k units (vs. market consensus of 700–800k units or more). Apple cut orders before launching Vision Pro in non-US markets, which means that demand in the US market has fallen sharply beyond expectations, making Apple take a conservative view of demand in non-US markets.

Neil Cybart, on Twitter/X:

Ming-Chi Kuo’s numbers and statements regarding Apple Vision Pro sales don’t make sense. [...]

Interestingly, when framing a 400K to 450K unit sales figure for Vision Pro in 2024 (which would actually be a good result), Kuo compares the range to a made up consensus figure of 700K to 800K unit sales. I don’t recall anyone running with such a high sales range for Vision Pro in 2024. Instead, Kuo himself actually claimed back on Feb 28th that a few suppliers were planning for 700K to 800K production. That’s not the same as a sales forecast. Far from it. Kuo would know that too, so one is left to assume he’s purposely being misleading.

Ming-Chi Kuo occasionally uncovers legitimate scoops from Apple’s Asian supply chain. Ming-Chi Kuo also regularly inserts his own name into the news when he has no legitimate scoops. This is one of the latter. There was no “market consensus” that Apple would sell 700–800K Vision Pro units in 2024. In fact, the reporting has been around the 400–450K range since last summer.

The Financial Times, back on 3 July 2023:

Two people close to Apple and Luxshare, the Chinese contract manufacturer that will initially assemble the device, said it was preparing to make fewer than 400,000 units in 2024. Multiple industry sources said Luxshare was currently Apple’s only assembler of the device. Separately, two China-based sole suppliers of certain components for the Vision Pro said Apple was only asking them for enough for 130,000 to 150,000 units in the first year.

TheElec reported last June that Sony only had the capacity to manufacture 900,000 OLED panels per year for Vision Pro, which, if true, would cap Vision Pro headset production at 450,000 units. The Information reported in August that this display bottleneck “is one reason why Apple plans to make fewer than half a million Vision Pros in the first year of production”.

Meta Threatens to Pull WhatsApp From India Over Encryption Battle ★

Russell Brandom, reporting for Rest of World:

IT rules passed by India in 2021 require services like WhatsApp to maintain “traceability” for all messages, allowing authorities to follow forwarded messages to the “first originator” of the text.

In a Delhi High Court proceeding last Thursday, WhatsApp said it would be forced to leave the country if the court required traceability, as doing so would mean breaking end-to-end encryption. It’s a common stance for encrypted chat services generally, and WhatsApp has made this threat before — most notably in a protracted legal fight in Brazil that resulted in intermittent bans. But as the Indian government expands its powers over online speech, the threat of a full-scale ban is closer than it’s been in years. [...]

It’s not clear how the courts will respond to WhatsApp’s ultimatum, but they’ll have to take it seriously. WhatsApp is used by more than half a billion people in India — not just as a chat app, but as a doctor’s office, a campaigning tool, and the backbone of countless small businesses and service jobs. There’s no clear competitor to fill its shoes, so if the app is shut down in India, much of the digital infrastructure of the nation would simply disappear. Being forced out of the country would be bad for WhatsApp, but it would be disastrous for everyday Indians.

One thing to remember is that this isn’t so much a conflict between what the law demands and what Meta chooses to do, but rather a conflict between what the law demands and the secure-by-design nature of WhatsApp. There is no “traceability” switch that Meta could flip but is choosing not to. They’d have to build a completely new, insecure-by-design, protocol to comply with this law.

See also: A 2022 feature in The Verge on the centrality of WhatsApp to digital life in India.

Kolide ★

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring last week at DF. Deepfakes are good and only getting better. In real life, people only detect voice clones about 50% of the time. You might as well flip a coin. And that makes businesses extremely vulnerable to attacks.

In the “classic” voice clone scam, the caller is after an immediate payout (“Hi, it’s me, your boss. Wire a bunch of company money to this account ASAP”). Then there are the more complex social engineering attacks, where a phone call is just the entryway to break into a company’s systems and steal data or plant malware (that’s what happened in the MGM attack, albeit without the use of AI).

But the good news is that we can be trained to learn how to identify suspicious phone calls — even when the voice sounds just like someone we trust. If you want to learn more about Kolide’s findings, read their report exploring the details of audio deepfakes.

Sunday, 5 May 2024

‘Boba Fett? Boba Fett? Where?!’ ★

I think this “May the Fourth” nonsense has gotten out of hand but this commercial from Apple is chef’s kiss. So fun. (Via Dan Moren, who points out a bunch of Easter eggs.)

Friday, 3 May 2024

Three-Year Gap Between Vision Pro 1 and 2? ★

Mark Gurman:

The good news for Meta is it could have plenty of time to pursue that goal. Apple’s latest Vision Pro road map doesn’t currently call for a second-generation model until the end of 2026, though the company is trying to figure out a way to bring a cheaper version to market before then. Apple is still flummoxed by how exactly to bring down the cost, I’m told.

If true this seems utterly bizarre. That would be close to a three-year gap between today’s first-generation Vision Pro and a second-gen model. Think about the iPad Pro. The ones on sale today, which we all presume will be replaced four days from now, were released in October 2022. That’s 18 months. And the general consensus is that the iPad Pro has gone a long time between updates.

“Late 2026” would presumably mean October or November 2026. That’d be 33 or 34 months after the release of the first-gen Vision Pro. So imagine the Vision Pro being as long-in-the-tooth as the iPad Pros are today and still being almost a year away from an update. That makes no sense. To everyone outside Apple it would, quite reasonably, look like an abandoned platform. They kind of did exactly that with the HomePod, but Vision was introduced as a major new platform, not a peripheral. Why wouldn’t there be at least a speed bump from the M2 to M3 or something between now and late 2026? Waiting until the end of 2025 would be a long (nearly two-year) gap; the end of 2026 might as well be forever from now.

A yearslong gap until the next Vision Pro might make sense if there were a, say, Vision Air on the roadmap for 2025, but Gurman says Apple doesn’t know how to make such a thing yet.

Thursday, 2 May 2024

Annotating Tim Cook’s Remarks on the Q2 Analyst Call ★

From Six Colors’s transcript of Apple’s financial results conference call:

Keep in mind, as we described on the last call, in the March quarter a year ago, we were able to replenish iPhone channel inventory and fulfill significant pent-up demand from the December quarter COVID-related supply disruptions on the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max. We estimate this one-time impact added close to $5 billion to the March quarter revenue last year. If we removed this from last year’s results, our March quarter total company revenue this year would have grown. Despite this impact, we were still able to deliver the records I described.

Excuses are cheap, but this really is a credible explanation.

We continue to feel very bullish about our opportunity in generative AI. We are making significant investments, and we’re looking forward to sharing some very exciting things with our customers soon. We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software, and services integration, groundbreaking Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy, which underpins everything we create. [...]

Turning to Mac, March quarter revenue was $7.5 billion, up 4% from a year ago. We had an amazing launch in early March with the new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air. The world’s most popular laptop is the best consumer laptop for AI, with breakthrough performance of the M3 chip and its even more powerful neural engine.

This doesn’t sound to me like a man about to announce iPad Pros with M4 chips. The present-tense “industry-leading neural engines” to me says Apple feels good about the AI capabilities of the devices already in our hands. What makes for a good “AI computer” are the very same things that make for a good computer, period.

However, we still saw growth on iPhone in some markets, including mainland China, and according to Kantar, during the quarter, the two best-selling smartphones in urban China were the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro Max.

It’s somewhat interesting to me that those are the two iPhone models: on the consumer side, the smaller-display iPhone 15; on the pro side, the big-display iPhone 15 Pro Max. The cheapest iPhone 15 model and the most expensive one.

Apple’s Regional Segments for Financial Reporting ★

My recent focus on the European Union’s DMA and the notion that, if the EU pushes too hard, Apple might pull back from sales in the EU, had me looking at how the company defines the “Europe” segment in its financial reporting. On the surface one might think that Apple’s “Europe” is just the EU plus the United Kingdom and Norway. But it’s actually much bigger than that: it’s all of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India. (Last I checked Africa is a pretty big continent, and India a pretty populous country.)

Today’s financial report for Q2 FY2024 got me wondering how exactly Apple defines its other regions. From their 2023 10-K (PDF):

The Company manages its business primarily on a geographic basis. The Company’s reportable segments consist of the Americas, Europe, Greater China, Japan and Rest of Asia Pacific. Americas includes both North and South America. Europe includes European countries, as well as India, the Middle East and Africa. Greater China includes China mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Rest of Asia Pacific includes Australia and those Asian countries not included in the Company’s other reportable segments. Although the reportable segments provide similar hardware and software products and similar services, each one is managed separately to better align with the location of the Company’s customers and distribution partners and the unique market dynamics of each geographic region.

“Japan and Rest of Asia Pacific” are two segments, but that clause is one of those examples that exemplifies why the Oxford Comma ought to be house style everywhere — as written, sans comma, that could easily be misread as a single segment.

Apple Q2 2024 Results ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2024 second quarter ended March 30, 2024. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $90.8 billion, down 4 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.53.

Net sales year-over-year by product (from Apple’s consolidated statement):

	Percentage	Dollars
iPhone	-10%	-$5.4B
Mac	+4%	+$0.3B
iPad	-17%	-$1.1B
Wearables, etc.	-10%	-$0.8B
Services	+14%	+3.0B

And by region:

	Percentage	Dollars
Americas	-1%	-$0.5B
Europe	+1%	+$0.2B
Greater China	-8%	-$1.4B
Japan	-13%	-$0.9B
Rest of Asia Pacific	-17%	-$1.4B

Credit where credit is due: IDC’s projection that iPhone sales were down 10 percent year-over-year was spot-on.

And Tim Cook’s decade-ago decision to focus both the company and investors’ attention on Services looks ever more prescient. As it stands, a 4 percent overall drop in revenue makes for an ever-so-slightly bad quarter. If not for Services growth, however, this would’ve been a not-so-slightly bad quarter.

See also: Six Colors’s usual assortment of charts illustrating Apple’s data.

Monday, 29 April 2024

The Talk Show: ‘I Decapitated the MacBook Air’ ★

Federico Viticci returns to the show to discuss MacStories’s 15th anniversary, Apple’s upcoming “Let Loose” keynote for new iPad hardware, and more.

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Google Security Blog: ‘How We Fought Bad Apps and Bad Actors in 2023’ ★

Google Security Blog:

In 2023, we prevented 2.28 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play in part thanks to our investment in new and improved security features, policy updates, and advanced machine learning and app review processes. We have also strengthened our developer onboarding and review processes, requiring more identity information when developers first establish their Play accounts. Together with investments in our review tooling and processes, we identified bad actors and fraud rings more effectively and banned 333K bad accounts from Play for violations like confirmed malware and repeated severe policy violations.

Additionally, almost 200K app submissions were rejected or remediated to ensure proper use of sensitive permissions such as background location or SMS access.

App stores are just greedy monopolies, am I right?

European Commission Designates iPadOS a DMA ‘Gatekeeping’ Platform Too ★

European Commission press release (italics added):

On 5 September 2023, the Commission designated Apple as a gatekeeper for its operating system iOS, its browser Safari and its App Store. On the same day, the Commission opened a market investigation to assess whether Apple’s iPadOS, despite not meeting the quantitative thresholds laid down in the DMA, constitutes an important gateway for business users to reach end users and therefore should be designated as a gatekeeper.

The rules are what the EC commissioners decide they are, not what the DMA says. Among their reasons cited:

• End users are locked-in to iPadOS. Apple leverages its large ecosystem to disincentivise end users from switching to other operating systems for tablets.

• Business users are locked-in to iPadOS because of its large and commercially attractive user base, and its importance for certain use cases, such as gaming apps.

The “lock-in” is basically just features exclusive to Apple’s own platforms. I’m not even sure how Apple could possibly create a platform without “lock-in”.

On the other hand, iPadOS is clearly more of a marketing distinction than a technical one. It’s iOS under the hood, so I doubt it’ll be much trouble for Apple to apply its DMA compliance features from iOS to iPadOS. I would have been surprised if the EC had not decided to designate iPadOS a “gatekeeping” platform, and I’m guessing Apple itself is unsurprised as well.

Sunday, 28 April 2024

WorkOS ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, supporting SSO, SCIM, user management, and RBAC.

Recently, WorkOS acquired Warrant, the Fine Grained Authorization (FGA) service for developers. Warrant’s product is based on Zanzibar, the open source authorization system originally designed by Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases.

WorkOS is already used by hundreds of high-growth startups like Vercel, Webflow, Plaid, and Perplexity.

If you are looking to build enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, or RBAC, consider WorkOS. It’s a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free.

M4 Chips in New iPad Pros? ★

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg:

Earlier this month, I broke the news that Apple is accelerating its computer processor upgrades and plans to release the M4 chip later this year alongside new iMacs, MacBook Pros and Mac minis. The big change with the M4: A new neural engine will pave the way for fresh AI capabilities. Now here’s another development. This year’s Macs may not be the only AI-driven devices with M4 chips.

I’m hearing there is a strong possibility that the chip in the new iPad Pro will be the M4, not the M3. Better yet, I believe Apple will position the tablet as its first truly AI-powered device — and that it will tout each new product from then on as an AI device. This, of course, is all in response to the AI craze that has swept the tech industry over the last couple years.

This would be a delightful surprise, but I have to say this makes no sense to me, especially given that in the very same column Gurman reiterates that Apple originally hoped to unveil these new iPads in March. The M3 generation of chips only debuted in November. The M3 MacBook Airs only debuted in March, when, according to Gurman, Apple had hoped to ship these iPads. How does that make any sense?

I have no doubt that Apple is poised to promote a slew of “AI” features across its platforms. But is the message at WWDC going to be that this year’s OS releases will bring new AI-powered features to all Apple devices — existing and new — or only to brand-new devices? Gurman is saying it’s the latter, but what are these “fresh AI capabilities” that require an M4, rather than just run a little faster on an M4?

Also, while Apple’s M-series chips have not yet settled into any sort of predictable pattern — as I wrote last week — Apple silicon has been on a very predictable annual schedule since 2011 or so. That’s when the iPhone 4S shipped, with the A5 chip, and new generations of A-series chips have appeared in September or October every single year since. Every generation of M-series chip has been developed alongside a corresponding generation of A-series chips. The M3 chips are the M-series siblings of the A17 Pro. The M4 generation chips, presumably, are siblings to the A18, which we presumably won’t see until the iPhones 16 launch in September.

Even putting aside the rumor — from Gurman himself! — that these new iPads were originally slated for March, it just seems highly unlikely that M4 chips are ready to go in May, just 6 months after the M3 debuted and 8 months after the A17 Pro. And it just doesn’t make sense that Apple would put them in iPad Pros first when they just launched MacBook Airs with the M3. It makes sense for the iPhone to get the first crack at each new generation of Apple silicon, because the iPhone is the most popular line of computers ever made. It makes sense of the Mac to get new M-series generations shortly after new iPhones, because the Mac is Apple’s workstation platform. It makes little sense for a new generation of Apple silicon to debut in iPads.

M4 iPads next week feel about as realistic as those flat-sided Series 7 Apple Watches that Gurman reported three years ago. So I’d bet money against this. In some sense it’s a can’t-lose bet — either I’m right and these iPad Pros will have M3 chips, or Apple’s silicon game is racing far ahead of what I considered possible, which would be rather amazing. Am I nuts or is no one else even skeptical about this?

David Heinemeier Hansson on the Framework 13 Laptop ★

Speaking of fascinating perspectives, here’s David Heinemeier Hansson, who recently switched from Mac, on the Framework 13 laptop:

Those are all the good parts, but there are plenty of drawbacks too. Compared to a modern MacBook, the battery is inferior. I got 6 hours in mixed use yesterday. The screen is only barely adequate to run at retina-like 2× for smooth looking fonts. Linux is far less polished than macOS. But somehow it just doesn’t really matter.

First of all, 6 hours is enough for regular use. If I’m doing more than that in a single stint without getting up, I’ll be paying for it physically anyway. And the somewhat cramped resolution has made me fall in love with full-screen apps again, like I used to do with that 11” MacBook Air.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Mac-vs.-Wintel rivalry was the tech rivalry. Other rivalries came and went — like Netscape-vs.-IE, Word-vs.-WordPerfect, Quark-vs.-Pagemaker, C-vs.-Pascal — but the main event was always Mac-vs.-Wintel. When the smartphone revolution occurred that rivalry was eclipsed by iPhone-vs.-Android. But it’s still there.

I’m fascinated following DHH’s switching saga. And my personal devotion to and reliance upon MacOS is such that, if the best-available MacOS-running laptop I could find got me only 6 hours of battery life, I’d accept it. I certainly remember getting less than 6 hours of battery life with a PowerBook. I specifically remember when it was dicey whether you could get through a coast-to-coast flight using a fully-charged Mac laptop. I lived. But nowadays, I wouldn’t fret boarding a coast-to-coast flight with my MacBook Pro only half-charged.

Apple silicon has spoiled me. I don’t even turn the display brightness down when running my MacBook Pro on battery power. I literally just don’t worry about it. It’s like two competing alternative universes when it comes to performance-per-watt. Presumably that’s what Microsoft seeks to change with Windows-on-ARM and these imminent new Surface laptops based on new chips from Qualcomm.

Paul Thurrott Reviews the 15-Inch M3 MacBook Air ★

Paul Thurrott, writing at his eponymous website:

Ultimately, I concluded that this isn’t just about looks, though that obviously plays a role. Instead, it’s a sum of its attributes, the total package. It’s the feeling of incredible lightness, given its size, when I pick it up to move to another room. The way it can sit on a bed or other soft surface and never get too hot or fire up some loud fans that aren’t even necessary or present in this device. How the battery just lasts and lasts and lasts, and makes a mockery of other companies’ “all-day battery life” claims.

It’s the little things, like effortlessly opening the lid with one finger and seeing the display fire up instantly every single time. Or the combination of these daily successes, the sharp contrast with the unpredictable experience that I get with every Windows laptop I use, experiences that are so regular in their unpredictableness, so unavoidable, that I’ve almost stopped thinking about them. Until now, of course. The attention to detail and consistency I see in the MacBook Air is so foreign to the Windows ecosystem that it feels like science fiction. But having now experienced it, my expectations are elevated.

I want to be clear about this. There is nothing like this in the PC space. Any laptop that’s configured such that it can handle workstation-class workloads will fire up jet engine-class fans for the duration, while any laptop that gets decent battery life and is reasonably quiet is incapable of those higher-end workloads. The MacBook Air does it all, in silence, without breaking a sweat. And it does so all day long on battery power.

Fascinating perspective. Spot-on review.

Local Note: ‘McGillin’s Bartender John Doyle Marks 50 Years at Philly’s Oldest Bar’ ★

Stephanie Farr, writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer (News+):

But his big break came when the downstairs bartender broke a bottle over an unruly customer’s head (the patron had reached behind the bar to serve himself). Doyle had to cover the bar when his coworker was hauled out by police in handcuffs.

And that’s how Doyle, 79, a married father of two and grandfather of four, came to be the longest-serving bartender at Philly’s oldest-operating bar. This month marks 50 years for Doyle at McGillin’s, which opened on Drury Street near 13th in 1860, and in true Philly fashion, the bar is throwing a yearlong party in his honor.

If you ever visit McGillin’s — and you should if you can — their exclusive McGillin’s 1860 IPA is the beer to order. Good food too. Back when I was in college they had some sort of ridiculous Friday night wings special — 100 wings for $10? — that never ceased to seem too good to be true.

Saturday, 27 April 2024

Joanna Stern Rigs a Drone to Drop-Test Phones From 300 Feet ★

Long story short, if your phone drops out of a plane, hope that it lands on grass.

Widespread Problem Has Locked Many Out of Their Apple IDs ★

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

There appears to be an increasingly widespread Apple ID outage of some sort impacting users tonight. A number of people on social media say that they were logged out of their Apple ID across multiple devices on Friday evening and forced to reset their password before logging back in…

We received our first tip about this around 8 p.m. ET. In the hours since then, the problem has gained significant traction on social media.

Apple’s System Status webpage doesn’t indicate that any of its services are having issues this evening. Still, it’s clear based on social media reports that something wonky is going on behind the scenes at Apple. A few of us here at 9to5Mac have also been directly affected by the problem.

Apple’s separate Developer System Status dashboard lists “Account” as having undergone maintenance and also having additional maintenance scheduled for later today. Apple ought to provide an explanation for exactly what’s gone wrong here, but has not yet.

The lockout hit Michael Tsai (again) and he copiously documented the entire experience, including being required to wait an hour before setting a new password because he has Stolen Device Protection enabled — despite the fact that he was at home, which is supposed to be a trusted location.

I just checked on my own iPhone, and the only two “Significant Locations” listed in Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → System Services → Significant Locations are “Work” and my favorite (and truly oft-visited) grocery store. But the “Work” location is centered three entire city blocks (~0.2 miles) from my home, which leaves my home just outside the radius that counts as that location. Luckily I wasn’t hit by this account lockout, but this also reassures me that I’m right to not yet have enabled Stolen Device Protection.

Microsoft Open Sources MS-DOS 4.0 ★

Scott Hanselman and Jeff Wilcox, on Microsoft’s Open Source Blog:

Ten years ago, Microsoft released the source for MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 to the Computer History Museum, and then later republished them for reference purposes. This code holds an important place in history and is a fascinating read of an operating system that was written entirely in 8086 assembly code nearly 45 years ago.

Today, in partnership with IBM and in the spirit of open innovation, we’re releasing the source code to MS-DOS 4.00 under the MIT license. There’s a somewhat complex and fascinating history behind the 4.0 versions of DOS, as Microsoft partnered with IBM for portions of the code but also created a branch of DOS called Multitasking DOS that did not see a wide release.

I am reminded once again that I somehow managed to get a computer science degree despite being utterly baffled by assembly code.

Brian Heater on the Rabbit R1 Launch Event ★

Brian Heater, writing for TechCrunch:

If there’s one overarching takeaway from last night’s Rabbit R1 launch event, it’s this: Hardware can be fun again. After a decade of unquestioned smartphone dominance, there is, once again, excitement to be found in consumer electronics. The wisdom and longevity of any individual product or form factor — while important — can be set aside for a moment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

I ordered one back on January 9, but still haven’t even gotten a shipping notice. But a slew of people have theirs already. Some first-look videos I enjoyed:

• iJustine
• Stephen Robles
• Dan Barbera at MacRumors

Thursday, 25 April 2024

Horse : Carriage :: Content : Ads ★

While I’m on a follow-up kick today, my item yesterday regarding Ed Zitron’s compelling essay on the corruption of Google Search quality by putting it in the hands of Prabhakar Raghavan, formerly head of ads at Google, reminded me of this oft-cited quote from Walt Disney:

We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.

Can’t say it better than that.

More on Keycap Shine ★

Another follow-up post, this one regarding my post yesterday regarding how “greasy”-looking keyboard keys are not, in fact, in need of cleaning, but instead are worn away because they’re made from soft ABS plastic, not hard PBT plastic. DF reader Brian Barefoot Burns wrote me:

Hey, John. Even on keyboards made with PBT key caps, the space bars are usually still made with ABS. The reason is that PBT shrinks more than ABS does during the manufacturing process. For the smaller key caps, this shrinkage can be managed, but it’s so significant on large keys like the spacebar, that even the IBM Model M and similar keyboards that used PBT still had ABS spacebars.

That explains both the visible erosion and yellowing of the space bars on my Apple Extended Keyboard II’s.

Also, there was a discussion on ATP episode 562 back in November about keycap wear, and one of their listeners pointed out that ABS can be made transparent to let backlighting shine through, but PBT cannot. You can make PBT keycaps with clear (ABS-filled) cut-outs for the letters, but that would undoubtedly add cost and complexity. My beloved Apple Extended Keyboard II has no backlighting at all. It’s quite possible that this entirely explains why Apple sticks with ABS despite the shiny-when-worn factor.

It’s also the case that some people’s natural skin oil wears away ABS plastic more than others. That same ATP episode’s show notes link to this extreme (and extremely gross) example. Jiminy. (Poor U, the least-typed vowel.)

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Wednesday, 24 April 2024

Dumbphones in 2024 ★

Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:

Two years ago, they both tried Apple’s Screen Time restriction tool and found it too easy to disable, so the pair decided to trade out their iPhones for more low-tech devices. They’d heard about so-called dumbphones, which lacked the kinds of bells and whistles — a high-resolution screen, an app store, a video camera — that made smartphones so addictive. But they found the process of acquiring one hard to navigate. “The information on it was kind of disparate and hard to get to. A lot of people who know the most about dumbphones spend the least time online,” Krigbaum said. A certain irony presented itself: figuring out a way to be less online required aggressive online digging.

The couple — Stults is twenty-nine, and Krigbaum is twenty-five — saw a business opportunity. “If somebody could condense it and simplify it to the best options, maybe more people would make the switch,” Krigbaum said. In late 2022, they launched an e-commerce company, Dumbwireless, to sell phones, data plans, and accessories for people who want to reduce time spent on their screens.

Chayka’s story ran under the bold headline “The Dumbphone Boom Is Real”, which is incongruously clickbait-y for The New Yorker:

Stults takes business calls on his personal cell, and on one recent morning the first call came at 5 a.m. (As the lead on customer service, he has to use a smartphone — go figure.) They pack each order by hand, sometimes with handwritten notes. They have not yet quit their day jobs, which are in the service industry, but Dumbwireless sold more than seventy thousand dollars’ worth of products last month, ten times more than in March, 2023. Krigbaum and Stults noticed an acceleration in sales last October, which they speculate may have had something to do with the onslaught of holiday-shopping season. Some of their popular phone offerings include the Light Phone, an e-ink device with almost no apps; the Nokia 2780, a traditional flip phone; and the Punkt., a calculator-ish Swiss device that looks like something designed for Neo to carry in “The Matrix” (which, to be fair, is a movie of the dumbphone era).

$70K/month in sales is legit, but far from a boom.

The two things that get me when I ponder, even for a moment, carrying a dumbphone: audio (podcasts/music) and camera. Pre-iPhone I’d leave the house with both a phone and an iPod, and sometimes a camera too. I actually just bought a new pocket-sized camera last year, but it seems ludicrous to even consider carrying a dedicated device just for audio, and with music streaming, people expect their portable audio player to have always-available networking. Also: AirPods. I’m not going back to wired earbuds, especially in the winter.

Ed Zitron on ‘The Man Who Killed Google Search’ ★

Absolutely scathing dissection of what’s gone wrong at Google Search, by Ed Zitron for his newsletter/blog:

In an interview with FastCompany’s Harry McCracken from 2018, Gomes framed Google’s challenge as “taking [the PageRank algorithm] from one machine to a whole bunch of machines, and they weren’t very good machines at the time.” Despite his impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made Head of Search in the middle of 2018 after John Giannandrea moved to Apple to work on its machine learning and AI strategy. Gomes had been described as Google’s “search czar,” beloved for his ability to communicate across departments.

Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that.” And when finally given the keys to the kingdom — the ability to elevate Google Search even further — he was ratfucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products.

Long story short, Ben Gomes was a search guy who’d been at Google since 1999, before they even had any ads in search results. He was replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, who previously was Head of Ads at the company. So instead of there being any sort of firewall between search and ads, search became a subsidiary of ads.

Zitron’s compelling narrative is largely gleaned through emails released as part of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google. Is the story really that simple? That around 2019 or so Google Search’s institutional priorities flipped from quality-first/revenue-second, to revenue-first/quality-second? It might be more complicated than that, but the timeline sure does add up.

And as a truism this feels right: if content reports to ads, content will go to hell. Publications, TV networks, operating systems, search engines — no matter the medium, you can’t let the advertising sales inmates run the asylum.

Why Your Most-Used Keyboard Keys Get Shiny ★

Jeff Gamet on Mastodon:

Know why you can’t clean the greasy spots off your compute keyboard? Because that isn’t grease. Lots of computer keys are made from ABS plastic, which is soft and cheaper than PBT plastic. Those shiny spots are where you polished the keys by typing.

I’m at least somewhat of a keyboard nerd, but somehow I only learned this a few years ago. The way worn-down ABS keycaps looks greasy, even though they’re not, reminds me of how snakes look wet, even though they’re not.

Over the last 30 years I’ve primarily used two Apple Extended Keyboard II’s at my desk (the “e” key’s switch died on my first one in 2006) and the only key that’s gotten a tad shiny on either of them is the space bar, where my right thumb hits it. You can literally see how the space bar eroded on the one I used from 1992–2006, which, not coincidentally, was a time when I played a lot of games on my Mac. The Extended Keyboard II I’ve been using since 2006 — which I’m using to type this sentence — shows some shine on the space bar, but no erosion.

Those old keycaps clearly weren’t made from cheap ABS plastic. But in recent decades, Apple’s keyboard keycaps have been made from ABS plastic (or, at least, some sort of plastic that develops a greasy-looking shine through use). I’d love to see Apple fix this problem. Apple’s just not known for cheaping out on materials.

Update: Follow-up post.

Tuesday, 23 April 2024

Senate Passes Bill to Force Sale of TikTok ★

Cristiano Lima-Strong, reporting for The Washington Post:

Congress late Tuesday passed legislation to ban or force a sale of TikTok, delivering a historic rebuke of the video-sharing platform’s Chinese ownership after years of failed attempts to tackle the app’s alleged national security risks.

The Senate approved the measure 79 to 18 as part of a sprawling package offering aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, sending the proposal to President Biden’s desk — with the House having passed it Saturday. Biden issued a statement minutes after the Senate vote saying he plans to sign the bill into law on Wednesday.

Once signed, the provision will give TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, roughly nine months to sell the wildly popular app or face a national ban, a deadline the president could extend by 90 days.

Finally.

Apple Renews ‘For All Mankind’ and Announces New Spinoff Series ‘Star City’ ★

Apple Newsroom:

Following its critically acclaimed fourth season, which has been praised as “the best-written show on all of television” and “superior sci-fi,” Apple TV+’s hit, award-winning space drama series “For All Mankind” has landed a renewal for season five. Additionally, Apple TV+ and “For All Mankind” creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi will expand the “For All Mankind” universe with a brand-new spinoff series, “Star City,” which will be showrun by Nedivi and Wolpert. [...]

A robust expansion of the “For All Mankind” universe, “Star City” is a propulsive, paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.

I can’t think of another show quite like For All Mankind. For one thing, there just aren’t many “alternate history” shows or movies, even though I tend to think it’s a great genre — a way to ground fantastic inventions with familiar elements. But the biggest distinction is the way For All Mankind has decade-long gaps in the timeline between seasons. We’ve seen some characters age 30+ years over just four seasons.

Bertrand Serlet: ‘Why LLMs Work’ ★

Bertrand Serlet — who was Apple’s SVP of software engineering from 2003–2011 and a staple during WWDC keynotes during that era — is now a YouTuber. Great 30-minute lecture explaining how LLMs and AI in general actually work.

FTC Announces Rule Banning Noncompetes ★

The FTC:

Today, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule to promote competition by banning noncompetes nationwide, protecting the fundamental freedom of workers to change jobs, increasing innovation, and fostering new business formation.

“Noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism, including from the more than 8,500 new startups that would be created a year once noncompetes are banned,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s final rule to ban noncompetes will ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to market.”

As I wrote a year ago, I used to think that noncompete agreements (“agreements”?) were mainly a thing in the tech industry. But their use became so rampant that even sandwich shop chains were requiring them.

NASA Engineers Successfully Debugged Voyager 1 From a Light-Day Away ★

Happy ending to this saga. Remarkable engineering.

Charles Edge Dies ★

Adam Engst, writing at TidBITS:

This one is way too close to home. News started to spread this morning on the MacAdmins Slack, Rich Trouton’s Der Flounder blog, and Tom Bridge’s site about how our friend and Take Control author Charles Edge died suddenly and unexpectedly on 19 April 2024. He was in his late 40s, and yes, his standard bio picture below gives you a feel for his sense of humor and irreverence.

Tom Bridge:

I don’t know what we’ll do without him.

But I can tell you how I’ll remember him, always. Charles always had a kind word for people. He always would take your call. He was the kind of friend who’d drop everything to help you, or to see if he could connect you to someone that could if he couldn’t.

I will miss his levity, his wisdom, his inescapable drive for knowledge, his passion for his friends and family, and his humbleness.

The MacAdmins Podcast has a nice In Memorium page, collecting a slew of other remembrances. Nothing but good thoughts to all of his friends and family.

Inside TSMC’s Expansion Struggles in Arizona ★

Viola Zhou, reporting for Rest of World on TSMC’s massive, but now much-delayed, chip fabrication campus outside Phoenix:

The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company; Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience they believe to be the foundation of their company’s world-leading success.

Some 2,200 employees now work at TSMC’s Arizona plant, with about half of them deployed from Taiwan. While tension at the plant simmers, TSMC has been ramping up its investments, recently securing billions of dollars in grants and loans from the U.S. government. Whether or not the plant succeeds in making cutting-edge chips with the same speed, efficiency, and profitability as facilities in Asia remains to be seen, with many skeptical about a U.S. workforce under TSMC’s army-like command system. “[The company] tried to make Arizona Taiwanese,” G. Dan Hutcheson, a semiconductor industry analyst at the research firm TechInsights, told Rest of World. “And it’s just not going to work.” [...]

TSMC’s work culture is notoriously rigorous, even by Taiwanese standards. Former executives have hailed the Confucian culture, which promotes diligence and respect for authority, as well as Taiwan’s strict work ethic as key to the company’s success. Chang, speaking last year about Taiwan’s competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that “if [a machine] breaks down at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m.” And, he added, the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would “go back to sleep without saying another word.”

Even the use of wife rather than spouse speaks to the culture clash.

Sonar Is Now Taska ★

Made by Windmill recently launched a fantastic Mac App for GitHub and GitLab issues. When it launched two months ago (and sponsored DF), it was named Sonar. They’ve changed the name to Taska, but it’s the same great app from the same great team. As I wrote when thanking them (now with the new name):

Taska combines the lightweight UI of a to-do app with the power of enterprise-level issue tracking, all in a native app built by long-time Mac nerds. The interface is deceptively simple, and very intuitive. Fast and fluid too. Everything that’s great about native Mac apps is exemplified by Taska. If you’ve ever thought, “Man, if only Apple made a native GitHub client...”, you should run, not walk, to download it.

Taska saves all your changes directly to GitHub/GitLab using their official APIs, so your data remains secure on GitHub’s servers — not Taska’s. Do you have team members not using Taska? No problem. Changes you make in Taska are 100% compatible with the web UI.

Free to try for 14 days — no subscriptions or purchases required. Taska remains my favorite new Mac app of the year. As stated above, Made by Windmill sponsored DF back in February, but this post today isn’t sponsored. I just like Taska so much that I want everyone to hear about the name change.

Apple Announces ‘Let Loose’ Event on May 7, Presumably to Announce New iPad Lineup ★

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of “Let Loose” and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event.

Tim Cook, on Twitter/X:

Pencil us in for May 7! ✏️ #AppleEvent

The entirety of the iPad lineup is due for updates, and the rumor mill expects a new model, a 13-inch-ish iPad Air. It seems clear a new Apple Pencil is forthcoming. The Pencil 2 launched in 2018, alongside the 3rd-gen iPads Pro, which sport A12X chips that benchmark comparably to the then-fastest MacBook Pros available. Those were fantastic iPads that foretold the Apple silicon revolution. My personal iPad remains a 2018 11-inch iPad Pro.

Also rumored: a new Magic Keyboard, with a more MacBook-like (and hopefully more durable) aluminum body and a larger trackpad. The current Magic Keyboards are now four years old. Apple might be settling all iPad family business in two weeks.

What I hope to see:

• New Pencil and new Magic Keyboards (11- and 13-inch) that work with all new iPads, Air and Pro alike. The Pencil compatibility situation has been a mess the last few years; now is the time to clean that up with a Pencil 3 that works across all new iPads.
• All new iPads with the front-facing camera on the long side, optimized for use in landscape/laptop orientation.
• Face ID replacing top-button Touch ID in the iPad Airs.

Why they’re showing the video at 7am PT / 10am ET, I don’t know. (Glad I’ll be on the East Coast though.)

Monday, 22 April 2024

‘The Apple Jonathan: A Very 1980s Concept Computer That Never Shipped’ ★

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

The backbone of the system would need to accept modules from Apple and other companies, letting users build what they needed in terms of functionality, as D’Agostino writes:

(Fitch) designed a simple hardware “backbone” carrying basic operations and I/O on which the user could add a series of “book” modules, carrying hardware for running Apple II, Mac, UNIX and DOS software, plus other modules with disk drives or networking capabilities.

This meant that every user could have their own unique Jonathan setup, pulling together various software platforms, storage devices, and hardware capabilities into their own personalized system. Imagining what would have been required for all this to work together gives me a headache. In addition to the shared backbone interface, there would need to be software written to make an almost-endless number of configurations work smoothly for the most demanding of users. It was all very ambitions, but perhaps a little too far-fetched.

I’d go further than “never shipped” and describe this is a concept that never could have shipped. It was a pipe dream. The concepts sure did look cool though.

Meta to Start Licensing Quest’s Horizon OS to Third-Party OEMs ★

Alex Heath, The Verge:

Meta has started licensing the operating system for its Quest headset to other hardware makers, starting with Lenovo and Asus. It’s also making a limited-run, gaming-focused Quest with Xbox.

On the theme of opening up, Meta is also pushing for more ways to discover alternative app stores. It’s making its experimental App Lab store more prominent and even inviting Google to bring the Play Store to its operating system, which is now called Horizon OS. In a blog post, Meta additionally said that it’s working on a spatial framework for developers to more easily port their mobile apps to Horizon OS. [...]

Zuckerberg has been clear that he wants his company to be a more open platform than Apple’s. Here, he’s firmly positioning Meta’s Horizon OS as the Android alternative to Apple’s Vision Pro. Given how Android was more of a reaction to the iPhone, an analogy he’d probably prefer is how Microsoft built the early PC market by licensing Windows.

It definitely seems more like Windows than Android — there’s no word that Horizon OS is going open source. But we have an answer regarding what Zuckerberg meant when he positioned the Quest platform — now the Horizon OS platform, I suppose — as the “open” alternative to Apple’s VisionOS.

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