Connor Oliver’s Favorite Computer: An Old Mac 

Connor Oliver:

This Mac has no form of notification system built in, it never begs for your attention and its applications never try to distract you from what you are doing, begging you to look at them instead. If I get distracted while using this Mac the fault lies squarely on me, not the computer and not the programs running on it.

This Mac is unchanging in a world where things change by the minute. It will never receive another software update and is thoroughly obsolete, but it’s comforting to have something that you know will stay the same forever, remaining in a known state every time you return to it.

Louie Mantia: Pixel Pirate 

Nice remembrance from Louie Mantia of his days working as an icon/UI designer at Apple circa 2010–2011.

Saturday, 4 February 2023

Glenn Fleishman on Getting Started on Mastodon 

Glenn Fleishman at TidBITS:

You can think of Mastodon as a flotilla of boats of vastly different sizes, whereas Twitter is like being on a cruise ship the size of a continent. Some Mastodon boats might be cruise liners with as many as 50,000 passengers; others are just dinghies with a single occupant! The admin of each instance — the captain of your particular boat — might make arbitrary decisions you disagree with as heartily as with any commercial operator’s tacks and turns. But you’re not stuck on your boat, with drowning as the only alternative. Instead, you can hop from one boat to another without losing your place in the flotilla community. Parts of a flotilla can also splinter off and form their own disconnected groups, but no boat, however large, is more important than any other in the community.

If you’re a regular Twitter or Facebook user — or avoided both those and similar services — and want to understand what Mastodon is, where it seems to be headed, and how to join in, read on. You don’t need a lot of technical details to understand why Mastodon and the Fediverse exist in sharp contrast to commercial social networks and why they hearken back to some of the more enjoyable aspects of earlier stages of Internet interactions.

I don’t think Mastodon is confusing, per se, but its federated nature makes it inherently at least a bit more complex than a centralized commercial network like Twitter or Instagram. Fleishman’s piece here is a wonderful overview.

Friday, 3 February 2023

“2001: A Space Odyssey” Directed by George Lucas? 

Holy hell this is absolutely amazing.

Now do Star Wars directed by Stanley Kubrick. Wait, they did it a year ago — not quite as sublime as Lucas’s 2001 but the docking scene is great.

Dithering 

February 2023 cover art for Dithering, depicting a woman, circa the mid-20th century, at a large computer terminal/printer of some sort. She is quite dapperly put together.

Yours truly and Ben Thompson’s podcast — two episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more. If you’re not listening, you’re missing out. Best $5/month you’ll ever spend, trust me.

Or, for a remarkable price of just $12/month or $120/year, subscribe to Stratechery Plus and get Dithering and Stratechery, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, and the latest podcast in the bundle, the NBA-focused Greatest of All Talk (Ben’s personal favorite podcast).

The New York Times’s ‘Big Tech’ Jihad Has Little Room for Per-Company Nuance 

Tripp Mickle, Karen Weise, and Nico Grant, writing for The New York Times in a story that seemingly didn’t need three bylines:

Now chastened, many tech companies have begun the year by championing a new and unfamiliar business strategy: austerity.

In recent months, several companies have said they are looking for ways to cut costs and eliminate futuristic projects that have become money pits. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta have each announced plans to lay off more than 10,000 workers.

I’m not sure why Apple is included in this story — let alone the subject of the hero photo illustrating it. The other companies have laid off 10,000+ employees and cut benefits and perks. Apple has, at worst, cut a few hundred retail positions — so few that it’s gone under the radar — and hasn’t cut any benefits or perks. Apple’s Q1 revenue was down 5 percent year over year, yes, but the company claims they took an 8 percent hit from international currency conversion headwinds. The complete shutdown of the massive Foxconn plant responsible for assembling Apple’s flagship iPhone 14 Pro models was a serious setback, but utterly unlike any of the problems facing Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Meta. But seemingly nothing can stop The Times from presenting “big tech” as a single monolithic narrative.

(Via Glenn Fleishman.)

Report It All, See What Sticks 

Mark Gurman, over the weekend in his Power On column/newsletter at Bloomberg:

Apple’s first mixed-reality device, likely to be dubbed the Reality Pro, will launch this year with an immense amount of new technology, ranging from dual 4K displays to a flexible OLED screen on the front that shows a user’s eyes.

I am once again reminded of the fact that, two weeks prior to its unveiling, Gurman reported that 2021’s Apple Watch Series 7 would be “all about a new design with a flatter display and edges”, when in fact the Series 7 was more rounded.

In addition to making me as curious as ever how he (along with fellow rumormeister Ming-Chi Kuo, who also fell for the flat-sided Series 7 bullshit) vets sources, just consider how dumb an idea a front-facing display on a set of VR goggles would be, putting aside how much dumber it would be to use such a screen to display fake eyeballs. Good displays are expensive. All displays consume large amounts of energy. Why add significant cost to an already expensive headset, and consume additional energy from a device so power-thirsty it’s going to ship with an external tethered battery (a fact Gurman does, I am told, have right), for a front-facing display that the user themself will never see?

Samsung’s Plans for XR Devices 

Chris Velazco, writing for The Washington Post:

Roh would not elaborate on the specifics of Samsung’s first new XR product, which will not appear at Wednesday’s launch event. “We’re getting there, but we’re not too far away,” he said.

Translation: Just waiting to see what Apple launches.

Tom Brady Retires Again, Before Dawn 

Dan Lyons, Sports Illustrated:

A source told Sports Illustrated’s Greg Bishop that Brady called the team around 6 a.m. ET. on Wednesday morning to inform them of his decision, two hours before he announced the decision to the rest of the world. He was weighing whether to retire until Tuesday, and had decided he would either play for Tampa Bay or retire, and would not join another franchise. ESPN’s Jeff Darlington was first to report on the timing of Brady’s decision.

Why in the world would you make a phone call like this at 6 in the morning? You call me at 6 a.m., someone better be dead or hospitalized.

Thursday, 2 February 2023

Federico Viticci: ‘The Practicality of Art in Software’ 

Federico Viticci:

We can’t talk about art in software in a vacuum. As a computer maker or app developer, you have to strike that balance between the aspirational and the practical, the artistic and the functional — the kind of balance that, by and large, Apple is achieving on the Mac. Unfortunately, when it comes to iPadOS, I feel like Apple has been prioritizing the artistic aspect over the functional, and it’s not clear when that will be rectified.

‘Twitter Is Killing Off the Fun Bots’ 

Katie Notopoulos and Pranav Dixit, reporting for BuzzFeed News:

Other bots are simply just fun. @ca_dmv_bot tweets out vanity plates that were rejected by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, along with the DMV’s reasoning. The bot’s creation was inspired by a Los Angeles magazine article about rejected plates, which revealed that they’re often incredibly funny.

Fantastic Twitter account, run by a 15-year-old kid.

Some bots are just pleasant and surprising additions to your timeline. Joe Schoech of Vermont runs @_restaurant_bot (random photos of restaurants from Google Maps), @_weather_bot_ (current weather conditions from randomized places around the world), @everygoodfella (screenshots of every second of the movie Goodfellas), and a few others. He also doesn’t plan on paying and is considering moving them all to Mastodon.

“It’s over,” he told BuzzFeed News. “Bots are maybe the best part about Twitter! I follow a ton of them, they’re cool and weird, and I will miss them. Fuck Elon, I never liked that guy.”

Amen, brother.

Onward to Mastodon.

Apple Q1 2023 Results 

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2023 first quarter ended December 31, 2022. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $117.2 billion, down 5 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.88.

“As we all continue to navigate a challenging environment, we are proud to have our best lineup of products and services ever, and as always, we remain focused on the long term and are leading with our values in everything we do,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “During the December quarter, we achieved a major milestone and are excited to report that we now have more than 2 billion active devices as part of our growing installed base.”

From Apple’s Consolidated Financial Statements (PDF), and Jason Snell’s ever-essential charts of that data:

  • iPhone revenue was down 8% year over year, seemingly attributable to COVID-19 production problems in China preventing Apple from meeting demand. (Also currency exchange rates hit Apple across the board.)
  • Mac revenue was down 29%, attributable, at least partially, to the just-launched-this-month new MacBook Pros and Mac Minis not having launched back in October. But I think Mac sales were destined to decline. They jumped two years prior during COVID lockdowns, when people who might otherwise have waited longer before buying bought new MacBooks for work-from-home and school-from-home. (Remember: the quarter prior to Apple silicon’s debut — despite the transition having been announced — was the best-ever quarter for Mac sales at the time.) And then sales got another one-time bump with the first generation of Apple silicon Macs, which many many people were waiting for.
  • iPad revenue was up 30%. It appears the new models that launched in October are successful.
  • Wearables revenue dropped 8%.
  • Services revenue grew 6%.

Not bad.

Meta Lost $13.7 Billion on Reality Labs in 2022 

Speaking of Meta’s quarterly results:

In its earnings report after the bell on Wednesday, Meta said its Reality Labs division, home to the company’s virtual reality technologies and projects, posted a $4.28 billion operating loss in the fourth quarter, bringing its total for 2022 to $13.72 billion.

As my recent writing suggests, I’m not sure what to expect from Apple’s upcoming headset. I sure as shit don’t expect them to lose $14 billion a year on it though.

Meta Reports Strong Earnings, Stock Jumps ~25 Percent 

CNBC:

Meta shares popped in extended trading on Wednesday after the company reported fourth-quarter revenue that topped estimates and announced a $40 billion stock buyback. Here are the results. [...]

  • Daily Active Users (DAUs): 2 billion vs 1.99 billion expected
  • Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 2.96 billion vs 2.98 billion expected
  • Average Revenue per User (ARPU): $10.86 vs $10.63 expected

Sure seems like it’s time for Zuckerberg to drop his whining about App Tracking Transparency. They still have an almost unimaginably massive audience — 2 billion users per day! — so surely there are ways to monetize that attention that don’t require cross-app tracking.

That ARPU extrapolates to about $45/year. Would you pay, say, $50/year to get an ad-free experience on Facebook’s products? A year or two ago I’d have said yes, just for Instagram. (My Instagram use has decreased significantly since then.) I realize they’re not going to offer that, but “average revenue per user” is an interesting metric.

See also: “The Inverse Cramer ETF remains undefeated.”

Twitter Is Turning Off All Free Access to Their APIs Next Week (Or at Least That’s the Plan as of Today) 

The Twitter Dev account:

Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead.

At least they gave some notice this time, but it’s emblematic of how seat-of-Musk’s-pants the whole company is now that they can’t even say yet what that pricing will be.

You might be asking, “Wait a second, didn’t Twitter shut down all the APIs for developers a few weeks ago?” But those were just the APIs for full-fledged Twitter clients. Today’s announcement covers all the other ways Twitter APIs could heretofore be used for free. E.g. the bot I wrote back in 2010 to auto-tweet links to each new post on Daring Fireball — that bot will stop working next week unless I pay. I’ll wait to see what the prices are, but I doubt I’ll pay. (Update: Elon Musk, on Twitter, says “~$100/month”.)

There are zillions of tools and bots that use these APIs. Molly White posted a few examples. For example, Alt Text Reader is an automated account that sends back the alt text description for any image on Twitter (that has alt text). There are umpteen weather services, traffic alerts, and just plain fun goofy accounts that send automated tweets. Many of them are run for free and can’t pay; others just won’t pay. This will also break the ability to follow a Twitter account’s posts via RSS — a very cool feature in some feed readers like NetNewsWire.

I don’t know what Musk is thinking, but he obviously has the value proposition backwards. These accounts freely produce content Twitter users enjoy. If anything, Twitter should be paying them, not the other way around. It’s like if YouTube started charging creators to post their videos.

And, of course, another use case for these APIs are tools like Movetodon, that allow people new to Mastodon to find and follow the Mastodon accounts of people they follow on Twitter. Use it now, before it breaks. (And if you’ve already started using Mastodon and used Movetodon, remember that you can re-run it to find people who’ve started Mastodon accounts after the last time you checked.)

Making Our Hearts Sing

Wednesday, 1 February 2023

Matt Birchler, “The Shocking State of Enthusiast Apps on Android”:

I recently commented on Mastodon that I thought when it comes to third party apps, iOS is remarkably far ahead of Android. My feeling is that you can take the best app in a category on Android, and that would be the 3rd to 5th best app in that category on iOS.

It’s harsh, I know, but I really think it’s true for basically every category of app I care about.

Someone responded to me saying that there are a bunch on Android apps that are better than their iOS equivalents. I wanted to be open-minded, so I asked what apps they would recommend I look at to see how Android is ahead of iOS. They recommended a text editor with a UI that looked more like Notepad++ than a modern writing tool.

Birchler’s Mastodon post was in a thread I started with my question about the best Android Mastodon clients, but I hadn’t noticed that he’d written this article until today — a day after my take on the same theme. Birchler goes on to review an Android RSS reader named Read You, which seems to be the best feed reader on Android. To say that Read You wouldn’t even register on the list of best iOS feed readers is being kind. It’s enough to make you wonder if anyone on Android even knows what a feed reader is. Birchler’s review is more than fair. He’s not cherry-picking one app in one category — I think it’s fair to say that Read You exemplifies the state of Android, for, as Birchler calls them, “enthusiast apps”.

Android enthusiasts don’t want to hear it, but from a design perspective, the apps on Android suck. They may not suck from a feature perspective (but they often do), but they’re aesthetically unpolished and poorly designed even from a “design is how it works” perspective. (E.g., Read You doesn’t offer unread counts for folders, has a bizarrely information-sparse layout, and its only supported sync service was deprecated in 2014. It also requires a frightening number of system permissions to run, including the ability to launch at startup and run in the background.) And as I wrote yesterday, the cultural chasm between the two mobile platforms is growing, not shrinking. I’ve been keeping a toe dipped in the Android market since I bought a Nexus One in 2010, and the difference in production values between the top apps in any given category has never been greater between Android and iOS. And that’s just talking about phone apps, leaving aside the deplorable state of tablet apps on Android.

Michael Tsai found two threads on Hacker News with short threads discussing my piece yesterday, here and here.1 A representative comment from an Android user skeptical of my take:

What on earth is he asking for out of these apps? How do you objectively compare one app’s “panache” with another? If I was a developer, what are the steps I can follow to program some “comfort” into my app? These complaints seem so wishy-washy and underspecified.

Then he leaves with the Kubrick quote: “Sometimes the truth of a thing isn’t in the think of it, but in the feel of it.” We’re fully in the realm of mysticism now, this is not an attempt to fairly compare or measure anything. [...]

I think if he’s going to praise some apps and dunk on the other ones, he should compare using measurable criteria. Otherwise, it’s only one person’s opinion. Just saying “App X feels right” is like saying “App X has a better chakra energy.” What is any developer supposed to do with that feedback? The whole article could have boiled down to “I personally like these apps and I don’t like those.”

That’s like asking for “measurable criteria” for evaluating a movie or novel or song or painting. I will offer another quote from Kubrick: “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.”

Art is the operative word. Either you know that software can be art, and often should be, or you think what I’m talking about here is akin to astrology. One thing I learned long ago is that people who prioritize design, UI, and UX in the software they prefer can empathize with and understand the choices made by people who prioritize other factors (e.g. raw feature count, or the ability to tinker with their software at the system level, or software being free-of-charge). But it doesn’t work the other way: most people who prioritize other things can’t fathom why anyone cares deeply about design/UI/UX because they don’t perceive it. Thus they chalk up iOS and native Mac-app enthusiasm to being hypnotized by marketing, Pied Piper style.

What’s happened over the last decade or so, I think, is that rather than the two platforms reaching any sort of equilibrium, the cultural differences have instead grown because both users and developers have self-sorted. Those who see and value the artistic value in software and interface design have overwhelmingly wound up on iOS; those who don’t have wound up on Android. Of course there are exceptions. Of course there are iOS users and developers who are envious of Android’s more open nature. Of course there are Android users and developers who do see how crude the UIs are for that platform’s best-of-breed apps. But we’re left with two entirely different ecosystems with entirely different cultural values — nothing like (to re-use my example from yesterday) the Coke-vs.-Pepsi state of affairs in console gaming platforms. On mobile, the cultural differences are as polarized and clearly delineated as the politics of our national affairs.

It’s no fluke that among Steve Jobs’s final words on stage was his soliloquy about Apple existing at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. March 2011:

It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

Making your heart sing. That’s the difference. 

  1. It sounds a bit conspirational, but for many years now it’s seemed clear to me that Hacker News has Daring Fireball in some sort of graylist. It’s not blacklisted, obviously, given the aforementioned two threads about yesterday’s piece, but nothing I write here ever gains any significant traction there. Ever. And the reason there are two threads for yesterday’s piece is that the first one disappeared from the home page soon after it was posted. I think? In this list of recent Hacker News threads for articles from DF, going back four months, only three have more than 10 comments — and two of those are the threads from yesterday. I don’t know who I pissed off there or why, but I’ve never seen an explanation for this. Update: HN commenter Michiel de Mare has quantified the apparent suppression, based on the ranking of this very article. Exactly what I’ve noticed for years. ↩︎

Wednesday, 1 February 2023

The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With George Santos 

The Onion:

The Onion: Are you a Yankees fan or a Mets fan?

Santos: A Mets fan? Baby, I was on the Mets!

Tuesday, 31 January 2023

The Talk Show: ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ 

Special guest Dan Moren joins the show to talk about the new M2 MacBook Pros and Mac Minis, the state of Mac gaming, and the triumphant return of the full-sized HomePod.

Brought to you by:

  • Kolide: The cross-platform endpoint security solution for teams that value privacy and transparency.
  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
Artifact: News-Focused Social App From Instagram Co-Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger 

Casey Newton, writing at Platformer:

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are back.

The Instagram co-founders, who departed Facebook in 2018 amid tensions with their parent company, have formed a new venture to explore ideas for next-generation social apps. Their first product is Artifact, a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends.

I lucked into an invitation from a friend. I’m square in the bullseye of the Artifact target audience, as both an inveterate news junkie and a huge fan of Systrom and Krieger’s original Instagram. Newton:

Users who come in from the waitlist today will see only that central ranked feed. But Artifact beta users are currently testing two more features that Systrom expects to become core pillars of the app. One is a feed showing articles posted by users that you have chosen to follow, along with their commentary on those posts. (You won’t be able to post raw text without a link, at least for now.) The second is a direct-message inbox so you can discuss the posts you read privately with friends.

I’ll give it some time, but at the moment, it’s a disappointment. The articles they show come directly from publishers’ websites, but because Artifact isn’t a web browser, per se, there’s no ad filtering. It’s just ads ads ads, interrupting seemingly every single article, every couple of paragraphs. This same “man, I miss ad blockers” feeling strikes me when I use Apple News too, but Apple News articles have way fewer ads, and better ads, than what I’m seeing so far in articles I read in Artifact. “Like Apple News but worse” is not a good elevator pitch.

To be clear, these aren’t Artifact’s ads. They’re the ads shown on the original web pages. But because the article design on most news websites sucks, the article design for most of the content in Artifact sucks. Update: Another annoyance: Because Artifact is using a custom web view rather than Safari’s embeddable view controller, you don’t get password autofill. I happily pay for subscriptions to over half a dozen sites, but I don’t know the passwords for any of them, because I rely on autofill from iCloud Keychain in Safari or Safari’s embeddable view controller. In some ways Artifact feels like it’s just a subpar web browser with decent suggestions for what to read.

Instagram was an instant sensation because it was obviously such a premium experience. Great photos, with cool filters (which filters were necessary to make phone camera pictures look great a decade ago), a simple social concept, all wrapped in a great app. Artifact does feel like a nice app, but the reading experience, at least today, is anything but premium. It feels cheap. And the social aspect isn’t there yet.

Was a Popular Brazilian Food Delivery App Bypassing Apple’s Location Privacy Settings on iOS? 

Rodrigo Ghedin:

iFood, Brazilian largest food delivering app evaluated at USD 5.4 billion, was accessing his location when not open/in use, bypassing an iOS setting that restrict an app’s access to certain phone’s features. Even when the reader completely denied location access to it, iFood’s app continued to access his phone’s location.

We got intrigued: how was iFood getting away with this?

An educated guess was revealed by iOS 16.3 release notes, launched on January 23th. Apple mentions a security issue in Maps in that “an app may be able to bypass Privacy preferences”. It’s CVE-2023-23503, submitted by an anonymous researcher and, so far, “reserved” in CVE’s system — which means details are pending to be published.

Via Dan Goodin, who asks:

I wonder how long this vulnerability was in effect. There may have been massive amounts of location data that was collected without users suspecting a thing.

If the iFood app was really doing this, why is it still in the App Store? If circumventing location privacy by exploiting a bug doesn’t get you kicked out of the store, what does? My hope would be that iFood wasn’t doing this maliciously. But if they were, that should be a one-strike-and-you’re-out violation.

Meanwhile, Over in Androidtown

Tuesday, 31 January 2023

Whilst we iOS users celebrate the recent releases of Thomas Ricouard’s Ice Cubes, Tapbots’s Ivory, and Tusker, and look forward to the imminent release of other new Mastodon clients like Shihab Mehboob’s Mammoth, over on Mastodon I asked what the best clients for Android are.

Long story short: crickets chirping.

The app that got the most recommendations is Tusky, an open-source client available free of charge. It’s fine, and for now, it’s what I’ve got on my home screen on my Pixel 4. But if Tusky were an iOS app, it wouldn’t make the top 5 for Mastodon clients. I’d describe its UI as brutalist. (Tusky does have fun “burst” animations when you tap the Like or Bookmark buttons on a post.)

Honorable mentions to Tooot, the official Mastodon client, and some open-source forks of the Mastodon app like Megalodon. There’s also Fedilab, which costs $2.50 on the Play Store but is also open source. I find Fedilab homely, even by the standards of Android apps, but it’s fast and has some neat features like built-in translation. (Bonus points to the fellow who suggested this Emacs mode, I believe non-sarcastically.) All of these apps are more brutalist than Tusky.

None of these Android clients would garner any attention at all on iOS. Tooot and the official Mastodon client are also available on iOS, and seemingly offer the same features and same basic interfaces on both platforms. There’s a reason third-party clients are overwhelmingly more popular on iOS than Mastodon’s official client — yet the Mastodon app is clearly among the best on Android. It’s really just a different world over in Androidtown. Things like fluid scrolling, swipe gestures, and tap-and-hold contextual menus are table stakes for an iOS app. None of the Android clients scroll fluidly, none offer swipe gestures, and only Tooot seems to offer a tap-and-hold contextual menu. But more broadly they all just look and especially feel inert and rigid. Nothing shrinks or stretches. There’s no life to them.

Google’s Android system software and first-party apps try. (The Chrome Android app in particular is iOS-caliber. Not iOS-style, but iOS-caliber, in terms of fluidity, originality, and attention to detail.) The Instagram app for Android tries. But for the most part, it seems like third-party Android apps don’t even try to achieve the look-and-feel comfort, fun, and panache of iOS apps. It’s a weird thing. The chasm between how iOS and Android apps look and feel is growing, not shrinking. The opposite happened with the Mac and Windows back in the ’90s. Windows itself and Windows software in the Window 3.x era were just awful. Starting with Windows 95, the gap closed significantly. Spending a few hours perusing the state of the art in Android Mastodon clients gives me the distinct impression that Android is forever stuck in its Window 3.x era of UI polish and design. It’s rough.

iOS and Android are, from a macro perspective, rival peer platforms. But it’s not like, say, game consoles — PlayStation vs. Xbox vs. Switch — where all of the major games on all of the consoles are striving for the highest possible production values. Not one Android Mastodon client seems to be striving for iOS-level production values. Again, not iOS style — just the baseline level of polish and detail-sweating that are de rigueur for apps like new Mastodon clients on iOS. Your bank’s iOS app probably sucks (mine does), but that’s because it’s probably a cross-platform web wrapper that’s nearly identical on Android (mine is). Nintendo Switch games don’t have the same style as PlayStation or Xbox games, but all of them are trying to be really nice. That’s just not a thing on Android. It’s banking apps almost all the way down. It’s an entirely different culture, with a different value system from iOS.

20 years ago my friend Brent Simmons wrote about why he chose to create apps exclusively for the Mac, despite the Windows market being so much larger:

One of the reasons I develop for OS X is that, when it comes to user interface, this is the big leagues, this is the show. That’s probably what Joel would call an “emotional appeal” — and to call it that, that’s fine by me. [...]

The other path is honorable and sensible and has its rewards too.

But to me it’s the difference between an empty night sky and a night sky with all the stars shining and a big, bright bella luna. “Emotional appeal?” Oh yes indeed. And I don’t apologize for that for one second.

I’m well aware there are Android enthusiasts who choose and embrace the platform because they strongly prefer it. But the differing priorities of both users and developers between iOS and Android are rendered stark by looking at Mastodon client apps. There doesn’t seem to be a single developer trying to make a commercial Mastodon client for Android, for one thing. Everything feels like a hobby app because everything is. Android seems to be the platform for people who consider this comprehensive feature checklist to be a helpful resource for evaluating which apps they should try. iOS is the platform for users and developers who care about craftsmanship, who see emotional appeal as something far more essential than any feature comparison that can be expressed in a spreadsheet. I often cite this quote from Stanley Kubrick: “Sometimes the truth of a thing isn’t in the think of it, but in the feel of it.” It’s the feel of iOS Mastodon clients that makes them outclass those on Android.

iOS is now the show. 

Saturday, 28 January 2023

Vivid 

My thanks to Vivid for sponsoring this week at DF. The latest MacBook Pros have displays that can reach 1,600 nits of brightness. Out of the box, you only see this brightness when viewing HDR videos or photos. Vivid is a utility that unlocks the full brightness of your screen, system-wide. It works on the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 or M2 chip, as well as the Pro Display XDR.

Try Vivid for free and see the difference yourself. It is not just a little brighter — it’s a lot brighter. It’s worth downloading and installing to see it in action. Whether you ordered a new M2 MacBook Pro this week, or if you want to give your “old” 2021 M1 Pro a cheap upgrade, you can get Vivid for 30 percent off — this week only.

Friday, 27 January 2023

Wayne Ma: ‘Apple Devising Software to Help Anyone Build AR Apps’ Using Siri, Not Code 

Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (MacRumors summary):

Apple is developing software to make it easy for users of its upcoming mixed-reality headset to build their own augmented reality apps, according to four people who have worked on the headset.

With the software tools, Apple hopes that even people who don’t know computer code could tell the headset, via the Siri voice assistant, to build an AR app that could then be made available via Apple’s App Store for others to download. The tool, for example, could allow users to build an app with virtual animals moving around a room and over or around real-life objects without the need to design the animal from scratch and calculate its movement in a 3D space with obstacles.

Ma says “apps”, and if they’d go in the App Store I guess they’d be apps, but what he describes sounds more like AR content than AR apps.

Some former Apple engineers have likened Apple’s content creation tool to the popular games “Minecraft” and “Roblox,” which make it easy for children to build their own 3D worlds and objects with simple interfaces.

Minecraft and Roblox are for children, LOL.

The current status of Apple’s app development tool couldn’t be learned. But some people familiar with it had seen demonstrations as recently as 2021.

Four people saw this tool over a year ago, and it’s news? Says me, the guy linking to it — but it’s such a cool idea to have an AR content creation tool right there in the AR headset environment. I think Ma is missing a lot of information about Reality Composer (or whatever the tool is going to be named), but establishing the platform as something for creation out of the box is exciting. (It took over a decade to be able to create iPad software on an iPad with Swift Playgrounds.)

The Billions-Dollar VR/AR Headset Question

Thursday, 26 January 2023

Matthew Ball wrote a thoughtful, deeply-considered essay worth your attention, “Why VR/AR Gets Farther Away as It Comes Into Focus”:

Throughout 2015 and 2016, Mark Zuckerberg repeated his belief that within a decade, “normal-looking” AR glasses might be a part of daily life, replacing the need to bring out a smartphone to take a call, share a photo, or browse the web, while a big-screen TV would be transformed into a $1 AR app. Now it looks like Facebook won’t launch a dedicated AR headset by 2025 — let alone an edition that hundreds of millions might want.

In 2016, Epic Games founder/CEO Tim Sweeney predicted not only that within five to seven years, we would have not just PC-grade VR devices but also that these devices would have shrunk down into Oakley-style sunglasses. Seven years later, this still seems at best seven years away.

The appeal and utility of all-day AR glasses is obvious. But we are obviously very far away from such devices being possible, at any price. And I don’t think such devices will ever be goggles with a screen, using cameras to show the real world. I think they must be see-through lenses that somehow include display technology that can project opaque objects and virtual “screens” within your field of vision. I am convinced we will get there. I am equally convinced we are not close to being able to make such devices.

It’s like Alan Kay’s 1972 Dynabook concept, which clearly articulated the laptops and tablets that now dominate personal computing, and but we’re as far from practical AR glasses today as we were from Kay’s Dynabook in the early ’80s, if not the late ’70s, with several extremely difficult technical problems to be solved. The original PowerBooks didn’t arrive until 1991. Or perhaps AR glasses are to VR goggles as the smartphone is to the laptop, and as the laptop is to the desktop PC. The modern smartphone, I would argue, is just a pocket-sized Dynabook. Mass-market laptops took over a decade to arrive after desktop PCs. The iPhone took about 15 years after the PowerBook. VR goggles are seemingly poised to arrive about 15 years after the iPhone.1

My strong gut feeling is that mass-market all-day AR glasses won’t be feasible until 15 or so years after the first sensational VR goggles. They’ll require that much of, and that many, generational leaps forward: chip miniaturization, battery tech, display tech, and sensor tech.

Ball, on the use-case question for VR/XR goggles today:

The examples listed above are technically impressive, meaningful, and better than ever. But the future was supposed to have arrived by now. In 2023, it’s difficult to say that a critical mass of consumers or businesses believe there’s a “killer” AR/VR/MR experience in market today; just familiar promises of the killer use cases that might be a few years away. These devices are even farther from substituting for the devices we currently use (and it doesn’t seem like they’re on precipice of mainstream adoption, either). There are some games with strong sales — a few titles have done over $100MM — but none where one might argue that, if only graphics were to improve by X%, large swaths of the population would use VR devices or those titles on a regular basis. I strongly prefer doing VR-based presentations to those on Zoom — where I spend 30-60 minutes staring at a camera as though no one else is there. But the experience remains fraught; functionality is limited; and onboarding other individuals is rarely worth the benefit because its participants seem to find these benefits both few and small. When the iPhone launched, Steve Jobs touted it did three distinct things — MP3 player, phone, internet communicator — better at launch than the single-use devices then on the market. The following year, the iPhone launched its App Store and “There’s an App for That” proliferated, with tens of millions doing everything they could on the device. The “killer app” was that it already had dozens of them.

This is, quite literally, the billions-dollar question: What are the intended use cases for Apple’s headset? After you buy it, unbox it, and power it on, what are you supposed to do with it? What features and experiences will seem worth spending a thousand or even thousands of dollars? I ponder this every day and I come up short:

  • Games — The visual appeal of a VR headset for gaming is obvious. But what’s the input story for an Apple headset that doesn’t come with handheld controller hardware? If Apple hasn’t been able to make its TV set-top box a major gaming platform after 16 years, how likely are they to do it for a headset priced like a premium PC, not like a gaming console?

  • Movies and TV — The visual appeal of a headset for watching video content is also obvious. In theory it’d be great while sitting on a plane or train — both visually and aurally immersive, like AirPods Pro but for both your vision and hearing. But who’s going to think that’s worth a thousand dollars, let alone perhaps thousands, when you’re still travelling with and carrying-on both an iPhone and a MacBook or iPad? Now that I carry tiny AirPods Pro with me everywhere I go, I don’t pack over-the-ear headphones (like, say, AirPods Max) in my travel kit, for reasons of bulk and weight — and Apple’s purportedly imminent VR/XR headset is almost certainly heavier and larger than AirPods Max.

  • Virtual meetings and FaceTime-style calls — Supposedly meetings in virtual reality with headsets are far more compelling than via Zoom with desktop/laptop/tablet displays and speakers. For the sake of argument, let’s just concede that that’s true. But for a $1,000+ headset to be compelling for such use presents a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s only possible when all or at least most of the people in the meetings are wearing compatible headsets. A virtual meeting where everyone else is participating Zoom-style but you are wearing a VR headset is going to make you look weird. And while FaceTime is phenomenally popular and much-used for personal calls, it is an utter non-entity for business meetings. Even Apple itself uses Webex for remote work meetings. Every successful platform Apple has ever established has been fundamentally driven by fun. The Apple II was a fun computer. The Macintosh was even more fun. The iPod and Apple TV are entirely about entertainment. The iPhone was the first fun phone. Apple Watch is Apple’s least fun platform, but I’d argue it’s the most “fun” wristwatch ever made. I suppose it’s true that work meetings in VR are more fun than via Zoom because they’re so much more immersive, but they can’t be more immersive than meetings in real life, and in-person real-life work meetings are seldom “fun”, and typically are dreadfully un-fun.

  • Personal computing via virtual projected displays — Mark Gurman’s latest report on the headset claims it “will be able to show immersive video content, serve as an external display for a connected Mac, and replicate many functions of iPhones and iPads”. But if you’re connected to a MacBook with a built-in display, why go through the hassle of carrying around and strapping on a headset? The obvious answer is that virtual displays in the headset might be far “larger” than even a 16-inch laptop display, and bigger displays are better. But all reports suggest that Apple’s headset will offer a 4K display per eye. 4K is generally 3,840 × 2,160 pixels. But Apple’s old 27-inch iMac and current Studio Display are 5K: 5,120 × 2,880 pixels. I don’t see how a headset with only 4K per eye can possibly simulate a virtual display with the field-of-view size and can’t-perceive-the-individual-pixels “retina” quality of a Studio Display. At your desk, I can’t imagine how wearing a headset would be better than sitting in front of a Studio Display. When travelling — even if your “travel” is no farther than your couch or the local coffee shop — it doesn’t seem worthwhile to wear a headset when your MacBook already has an excellent display, even if only 13 inches. Perhaps I simply lack imagination in this regard, and the experience will be far more compelling than I think it would be. But I just don’t see people spending $1,000+ to do their computing work wearing a headset when their MacBook already has a display built in, and the ability to see and participate in the real world around your display is inherent and entirely natural. If you’re carrying a hardware keyboard and a mouse/trackpad, why not carry an all-in-one laptop? And if you’re not carrying a hardware keyboard and mouse/trackpad, you’re never going to be as productive as you’d be if you did.2 And I haven’t even mentioned compute performance or battery life.

I can’t think of any other use cases for a VR/XR headset. I cannot believe that such a headset would be intended for wearing around as you go about daily life, augmenting the real world with virtual displays and ambient contextual information. That’s what we need AR glasses for, not VR goggles.

As I’ve repeated in my recent speculation about Apple’s headset, I am not dismissing it in advance. Quite the opposite — I look forward to experiencing it with great anticipation. I believe Apple must have answers to the question of why we will want to buy it, carry it, and use it in addition to and alongside all the devices we already buy, carry, and use. Why else bring it to market? But damned if I can imagine those answers, given the state of chip, display, and battery technology today. 

  1. One can certainly argue that there was a solid market for smartphones about 5 years before the iPhone — the heyday of BlackBerry and Symbian. Similarly, there have been popular VR headsets for sale — PlayStation VR, HTC Vive, and Facebook’s Oculus and Quest — for about 5 years. The Macintosh came about 5 years after the command-line Apple II. There were crappy but serviceable notebook computers 5 years before the PowerBook. So the pattern I’m talking about seems to be that it takes about 10 years to start one of these generational leaps with clumsy primordial products, and another 5 years for Apple to hit upon and ship the paradigm that really sticks and winds up defining the entire category henceforth. It’s not that Apple is seldom first — they’re never first, because they don’t ship their prototypes. ↩︎

  2. Do you type as well on an iPad touchscreen as you do on a real keyboard? Do you think Apple is going to ship a virtual reality keyboard where you move your fingers in the air that works as well as even an iPad touchscreen keyboard? I do not. ↩︎︎

Thursday, 26 January 2023

1982 TV News Report on Arcade Video Games 

This brief report was remarkably well-done. I love everything about it, including their choice of games: Pac-Man and Defender. Includes a great shot of Midway’s Pac-Man factory floor in Chicago, where they were manufacturing 350 cabinets a day.

U.S. State Department Is Phasing Out Times New Roman, Adopting Calibri 

John Hudson and Annabelle Timsit, reporting last week for The Washington Post:

In a cable sent Tuesday and obtained by The Washington Post, Secretary of State Antony Blinken directed the department to use a larger sans-serif font in high-level internal documents, and gave the department’s domestic and overseas offices until Feb. 6 to “adopt Calibri as the standard font for all requested papers.”

“The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin,” read the subject line.

It is correct for the State Department to have a house style for documents. I’m not sure what font they should use, but it wasn’t Times, and it shouldn’t be Calibri. Off the top of my head, I’d suggest Caslon — a sturdy, serious typeface that looked good 250 years ago, looks good now, and should look good 250 years from now.

Facebook Reinstates Trump’s Accounts 

Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta:

Like any other Facebook or Instagram user, Mr. Trump is subject to our Community Standards. In light of his violations, he now also faces heightened penalties for repeat offenses — penalties which will apply to other public figures whose accounts are reinstated from suspensions related to civil unrest under our updated protocol. In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation.

So no matter what Trump does, the longest they’ll suspend him is another two years? This is whistling past the graveyard. Trump wasn’t suspended because he posted something, say, racist or untruthful or hateful. It’s not about Trump and his supporters being on the political right. The man tried to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States while serving as President of the United States. He still insists he was correct to do so, and quite obviously intends to try again. If there were only one person in the world suspended from Facebook’s platforms, it should be Donald Trump. No one is more dangerous. No one is more deserving of being outcast as a pariah.

Wednesday, 25 January 2023

Twitter(rific) and Accessibility 

Speaking of The Iconfactory’s Ged Maheux, Steven Aquino has a brief interview with him regarding Twitterrific’s long-excellent accessibility support, and the whole Twitter shitshow:

For his part, Maheux told me in an recent interview conducted over email “accessibility should be important to any developer” but added The Iconfactory’s resolve to support it to the fullest extent possible certainly has strengthened over time. The company, he said, has garnered much feedback from people in the disability community over the years, who continually have asked for improved accessibility in Twitterrific. Moreover, Maheux explained it “really means the world to us” to have members of the community get in touch and thank them for all the hard work put into making the app as accessible as it can be to everyone.

I’ll repeat this until I’m hoarse, but the apps that best support accessibility features for disabled people invariably are also the most usable for everyone. As for the future, it’s ominous:

The loss of Twitterrific is one The Iconfactory, and especially disabled Twitter users, will mourn for some time. To its credit, Twitter’s own first-party app used to be pretty solid in terms of adopting system accessibility features like Dynamic Type and Increase Contrast on both iOS and the Mac. Of course, that all changed drastically and (likely) irreparably when Musk inexplicably and unconscionably gutted the company’s entire accessibility team as part of the layoffs that occurred in early November.

Linea Sketch 4.2 

Ged Maheux at The Iconfactory:

Organic Ink gives your sketches a rustic and natural appearance that is unlike anything previously offered in Linea. You can even tilt your Apple Pencil as you draw to quickly shade wide areas with texture.

Such a cool effect, period, but kind of amazing to see it live, not as a filter applied in post.

Users of the venerable drawing app Paper, by 53/WeTransfer, can now easily transfer their creations into Linea. When imported via iCloud, Paper files are converted into a layered sketch document, perfect for further refinement in Linea.

Spread the word about this to anyone you know with an archive of old Paper sketches. Right from the start Linea has always struck me as Paper’s spiritual successor.

Tuesday, 24 January 2023

LastPass Breach Is Looking Worse 

Carly Page, reporting for TechCrunch:

The breach was first confirmed by LastPass on November 30. At the time, LastPass chief executive Karim Toubba said an “unauthorized party” had gained access to some customers’ information stored in a third-party cloud service shared by LastPass and GoTo. The attackers used information stolen from an earlier breach of LastPass systems in August to further compromise the companies’ shared cloud data. GoTo, which bought LastPass in 2015, said at the time that it was investigating the incident.

Now, almost two months later, GoTo said in an updated statement that the cyberattack impacted several of its products, including business communications tool Central; online meetings service Join.me; hosted VPN service Hamachi, and its Remotely Anywhere remote access tool.

GoTo said the intruders exfiltrated customers’ encrypted backups from these services — as well as the company’s encryption key for securing the data.

This breach now sounds like a company covering its ass. LastPass users should consider everything they stored in LastPass tainted.

WSJ: ‘Banks Plan Payment Wallet to Compete With PayPal, Apple Pay’ 

AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+, Archive.is):

Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and four other banks are working on a new product that will allow shoppers to pay at merchants’ online checkout with a wallet that will be linked to their debit and credit cards.

The digital wallet will be managed by Early Warning Services LLC, the bank-owned company that operates money-transfer service Zelle. The wallet, which doesn’t have a name yet, will operate separately from Zelle, EWS said.

One goal of the new service is to compete with third-party wallet operators such as PayPal Holdings Inc. and Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay, according to people familiar with the matter. Banks are worried about losing control of their customer relationships.

I bet this endeavor will see similar success as CurrentC. In fact, I suggest they name the product “BanksC”. I’m sure the homonymous artist would love to create a logo for them.

Ivory 1.0 for iOS 

Still “early access”, but as a decade-long Tweetbot user, it feels like home. $2/month or $15/year — prices that better reflect the value of this extraordinary app than Tweetbot’s did. And how great is this?

ChatGPT: The First True Threat to Google Search? 

Dave Winer:

I went to ChatGPT and entered “Simple instructions about how to send email from a Node.js app?” What came back was absolutely perfect, none of the confusing crap and business models you see in online instructions in Google. I see why Google is worried. ;-)

No need for a winky there. The threat to Google is real. That type of search for a clearly-written one-line programming question used to produce excellent results from Google Search. For a number of years, though, search results for queries like that — both at Google and competing search engines — have been littered with junk generated by content farms. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack sometimes, combing through the query results for a proper solution.

Stack Overflow, of course, is very successful, and the whole point of it is providing a place to find good answers to programming questions. The problem with Google Search today isn’t specific to programming questions, but the general problem of answering how-to questions in any subject.

And look who’s coming — the most ruthlessly competitive company in computing history.

Monday, 23 January 2023

Chartjunk of the Week 

Ben Norton, writing for Geopolitical Economy Report:

If a student presented this in a statistics 101 class, the teacher would likely give them an F. But because it involves Washington’s public enemy number one, Beijing, the US regional reserve bank was awarded a Golden Star for exemplary service in the New Cold War.

The St. Louis Fed listed the world’s top six countries by military expenditures, but used two separate axes: the spending of China, Russia, Britain, India, and Saudi Arabia was depicted on the left axis, which went from $0 to $300 billion; but a separate right axis was created just for the United States, which went from $400 billion to $1 trillion.

This is one of the most deliberately misleading charts I’ve seen in a long time.

Twitter’s Infrastructure Continues to Crumble, Silently 

David Frum, on Twitter:

I’m doing an experiment. On my computer, I am checking the latest tweets by people I follow. On my phone, I’m checking whether their most recent tweets are showing up in the “Following” column. I’m just getting started, but even in the first dozen cases, Twitter failed to show me an absolute majority of the tweets I had requested to see. That’s the reason your engagement is down, people: Twitter is withholding requested content from those who requested it.

For me, Twitter is most valuable as an information source. But Twitter is now rapidly mutating into a source that capriciously withholds information I asked for - including from such highly official sources as the Tate Gallery in London.

It’s as if, in the days of the old newspaper, my subscription were delivered with random stories scissored out by the publisher itself, for some capricious whim of the publisher’s own.

It’s worse than that, though, because if you were delivered a newspaper with random stories scissored out, you’d know that there were missing stories. You wouldn’t know what they were, but you’d see the gaping holes in the paper. With Twitter now, there’s no indication that you’re missing tweets — let alone a huge number of tweets. And to be clear, Frum is talking about the “Following” timeline, not the “For You” algorithmic timeline. “Following” is the timeline that dates back to Twitter’s very inception: you pick accounts to follow, then you see the tweets those accounts post.

Twitter is no longer able to do that. Here’s a speculative thread explaining what might be going on — sounds like a very solid guess to me. In short: after cutting back on servers and entire data centers, Twitter can no longer keep up with its own content.

I remarked over a week ago that I was no longer seeing mentions or replies directed at my Twitter account. For a day or two I was seeing a handful of them, but now they’re gone. At this writing I see a grand total of one mention for my account going back to January 5. My Twitter mentions are nearly completely useless. For well over a decade, Twitter mentions have been my primary way of interacting with the Daring Fireball audience. Obviously that’s no longer possible. So be it. All the good action is over on Mastodon now, anyway. I’m more active there now, and just like I used to at Twitter, I read all my mentions there. I’ve updated my Contact page accordingly.

The Lisa Turns 40 

Hansen Hsu, writing for the Computer History Museum:

Happy 40th Birthday to Lisa! The Apple Lisa computer, that is. In celebration of this milestone, CHM has received permission from Apple to release the source code to the Lisa software, including its system and applications software.

Access the code here.

What is the Apple Lisa computer, and why was its release on January 19, 1983, an important date in computer history? Apple’s Macintosh line of computers today, known for bringing mouse-driven graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to the masses and transforming the way we use our computers, owes its existence to its immediate predecessor at Apple, the Lisa. Without the Lisa, there would have been no Macintosh — at least in the form we have it today — and perhaps there would have been no Microsoft Windows either.

The Lisa was a bit before my time, and so expensive that I can’t even think of an alternate universe where I might have encountered one. To this day, I’ve never seen one. The Mac interface captured a certain magic that the Lisa’s quite obviously did not — I think the Lisa ultimately failed more because of that than its price. But its influence on the original Mac is obvious.

Here’s a gem of a comment a friend spotted in the source code (appw-prefmain.text.unix.txt):

{ Welcome to the ALL Create Preferences Window.

    Through the extensive use of hallucenogens I have found
    truth and beauty. However, those same hallucenogens have
    also made me incapable of getting to Dodge Ridge to sell
    reclaimed ski wax in the parking lot.}

No idea what that means, but the early 1980s were a different era. Might have made perfect sense then.

Update: The above comment is obviously the follow-up to this comment in appw-config.text.unix.txt:

{ WELCOME to the PREFERENCES WINDOW.
    Don't be alarmed by the mess, we're just moving in.

    The author apologizes for the lack of style and elegance
    exhibited in this code, perhaps someday truth and beauty
    will be mine and I will rewrite it. However, if truth and
    beauty ever does come to me I'll prabably just leave and
    sell reclaimed ski wax in the Dodge Ridge parking lot.
    See you there!}
Polygon: ‘Timothée Chalamet Even Makes Stumping for Apple Seem Cool’ 

Ana Diaz, writing for Polygon:

The trailer basically serves as a giant sign trying to remind people about Apple TV and all of its projects, but it mainly just shows us that Timothée Chalamet is a phenomenal actor. In it, we get to see that even super successful actors like Chalamet can even be insecure about their careers or get FOMO! According to Puck, sources close to the deal disclosed Apple paid Chalamet the most it has ever paid for a celebrity endorsement. So it’s a good thing that’s he’s already charmed fans online.

This ad played during the football games this weekend, and I think it’s rather amazing. By paying a red-hot star like Chalamet simply to promote TV+, it’s a way of emphasizing the single most important aspect of TV+: that it is a quality-first streaming platform. Not the most content, by a long shot, but perhaps the best content. And inarguably, much of the best content.

That, in a nut, is the Apple way. They don’t sell the most computers or headphones or even phones, but they sell the best ones.

Windows Central: ‘Microsoft Has Laid Off Entire Teams Behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens’ 

Jez Corden, reporting for Windows Central:

For Microsoft to cull the entire team behind MRTK, which was due to release a new version just next month, it paints a picture of a company that perhaps no longer believes in virtual reality. There are many who believe the “metaverse” represents the next big opportunity in human-computer interfacing, but even Facebook, who rebranded its entire company to Meta in the belief of this technology, is scaling back in this area as well — laying off 11,000 staff back in November.

I think it’s worth noting that Facebook rebranded as “Meta” just as much because the “Facebook” brand is so sullied as anything else, but clearly, Mark Zuckerberg hopes to establish their headsets as a major new consumer computing platform.

It’s curious too that Microsoft would seemingly abandon its own years-long efforts in the XR space on the cusp of Apple’s entrance. It brings to mind the original Surface — a $10,000 touchscreen table the company started selling in May 2007, only to eventually cede the entire touchscreen revolution in personal computing to Apple and Android.

Update: This parody narration for Microsoft’s promotional video is the best review of the original Surface. (Via Colin Weir.)

Tweetbot Is Dead; Long Live Ivory 

Nice goodbye to one of the very best apps I’ve ever used, and a splendid illustration.

Sunday, 22 January 2023

Meh 

My thanks to Meh for sponsoring DF last week. Here’s Meh’s deal: they put up a new deal every day, and it’s not boring stuff. As they say, “It’s actual, real, weird shit you didn’t know existed for half the price you would’ve guessed.”

How they stay in business I don’t know — the only ads they ever buy are the sponsorships here at Daring Fireball. But their website is fun every single day.

WSJ: ‘How Apple Has So Far Avoided Layoffs: Lean Hiring, No Free Lunches’ 

Aaron Tilley, reporting yesterday for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

From its fiscal year-end in September 2019 to September 2022, Apple’s workforce grew by about 20% to approximately 164,000 full-time employees. Meanwhile, over roughly the same period, the employee count at Amazon doubled, Microsoft’s rose 53%, Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s increased 57% and Facebook owner Meta’s ballooned 94%.

Apple has about 65,000 retail employees working in more than 500 stores who make up roughly 40% of the company’s total workforce.

I would argue that it’s not so much that Apple has hired “lean”, but rather that its peers have hired profligately in the last 4 years. Amazon is different because they have so many retail and warehouse jobs, but it makes no sense to me that Facebook doubled its headcount after 2019 other than that they were hiring for the sake of hiring.

Update: Good chart from Chartr showing headcounts among Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook since 2018.

Friday, 20 January 2023

Google Is Laying Off 12,000 Employees (6 Percent of Workforce) 

Sundar Pichai, in a company-wide memo:

Googlers,

I have some difficult news to share. We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices.

This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I’m deeply sorry for that. The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.

This is a stronger, more confident, more honest and direct memo than Satya Nadella’s at Microsoft. (Which, as I noted, went 167 nervous words before getting to the point.)

Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.

There are numerous reasons the tech industry wound up at this layoffpalooza, but I think the main reason is that the biggest companies got caught up in a game where they tried to hire everyone, whether they needed them or not, to keep talent away from competitors and keep talent away from small upstarts (or from founding their own small upstarts). These big companies were just hiring to hire, and now the jig is up.

There’s only one big tech company that seemingly never played this hire-for-the-sake-of-hiring game, and thus hasn’t announced any layoffs at all, let alone a headcount that would fill a basketball arena. Just one. One company that has, at its best, always kept its cool in the face of economic swings both up and down.

Thursday, 19 January 2023

The Talk Show: ‘Slow-Moving Hurricane’ 

Craig Hockenberry returns to the show to talk about the demise of third-party Twitter clients, the overall Twitter shitshow, touchscreens on the Mac, and the perils of autocorrect when you have a clever username.

Brought to you by these fine sponsors:

  • Nebula: Videos. Podcasts. Classes. Creator-built and creator-owned.
  • Trade Coffee: Incredible coffee delivered fresh from the best roasters in the nation
  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.