Hiawatha Bray on the Original iMac: ‘Too Odd to Succeed’ 

A little more vintage claim chowder — this serving from Hiawatha Bray, then the technology columnist for the Boston Globe, in May 1998:

Even though Apple will never be the great company it could have been, you can’t watch its recent revitalization without a sense of bittersweet fascination.

Never.

The iMac doesn’t include a floppy disk drive for doing file backups or sharing of data. It’s an astonishing lapse from Jobs, who should have learned better.

Astonishing.

Vintage 2007 Claim Chowder: Josh Quittner Returned His iPhone 

Don’t know about you, but I’ve got a hankering for some vintage claim chowder today. I sometimes forget how big a deal Apple’s refusal to support Flash Player on iPhone was for a few years.

Dithering

Thursday, 7 May 2020

May 2020 album art for Dithering.

Dithering is a new podcast from yours truly and Ben Thompson. Three episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more.

It’s a subscription: $5/month or $50/year.

Ben and I have been noodling on this idea for a while. (Working title for my autobiography: This Took a Lot Longer Than I Thought It Would.) Ben, in particular, has long been convinced — correctly, I obviously believe — that paid subscriptions are a natural fit for podcasts, but yet have been almost entirely untried.

So, we’re trying it.

If you enjoy The Talk Show when Ben is my guest, you should love Dithering. You know me, you know Ben, and you know the stuff we enjoy writing and talking about. But at the same time it’s a very different show. Episodes of The Talk Show are — depending on your personal taste and available time — either famously or infamously long, and appear on a somewhat irregular schedule. Episodes of Dithering are very regular, both in schedule (every Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and in length (15m:00s).

Reader / listener / member-supported subscriptions to support independent media producers are not a new idea — not even for me. When I first tried earning some scratch here at Daring Fireball, all the way back in 2004 — George W. Bush was running for reelection and my now-16-year-old son was five months old — I launched a membership program here at Daring Fireball. Members got access to full-content RSS feeds, and access to my then-new Linked List posts 24 hours before they appeared on the website for everyone else. To render a long story very short,1 member-only RSS feeds did not play well with Google Reader, and Google Reader was extraordinarily popular. Even people who used standalone RSS readers like NetNewsWire often used Google Reader as the back end for syncing. Rather than fight the tide, I went with the tide, and made the full content feed free for everyone and decided to try monetizing it through weekly sponsorships instead of subscriptions.

The rest is history — 13 years and counting of DF weekly sponsorship history. (Spots are currently open at the end of May and all of June.)

I hit the 2 million written words mark by the time Daring Fireball turned 15 in 2017, and have written some number of additional words since then. I’ve published 283 episodes of The Talk Show, totaling well north of 500 cumulative hours (on top of 120 episodes of the show’s two previous incarnations). Not one word, not one minute behind a subscriber paywall.

But I love and believe in the idea of reader / listener / member-supported subscriptions, and I’ve been looking for something I could offer that feels right. That’s Dithering.

Some notes:

  • Dithering is subscription-only but it is entirely built on plain-old wide-open RSS, and is designed to work with any and all podcast players. There is no Dithering app and never will be. Sign up at the Dithering website and you’ll get a link you can use to subscribe in whatever podcast app you already use.

  • From a medium-is-the-message perspective, I think we’re doing something neat with Dithering. Episodes exist only in the feed, and thus, from a listener’s perspective, only in their podcast player.

  • The back end is built on Ben’s membership system for Stratechery. If you only care about Dithering, you won’t notice that, other than bouncing over to Stratechery during the sign-up process. But if you are already a Stratechery member (or want to be — trust me, it’s worth it) you can upgrade to add Dithering at a discount, and if you’re already subscribed to the Stratechery Daily Update podcast, Dithering episodes will appear in the same feed. You don’t need to add a new subscription.

  • We’ve been recording episodes since mid-March on the same Mon / Wed / Fri schedule we intend to keep going forward. Our original plan was to use those “beta” episodes just to get our sea legs under us — I, for one, needed some practice to get in the groove of 15-minute episodes. But they turned out good enough to keep, so we’re launching with 20 episodes in the feed. (My sincere thanks to our small group of beta testers, who were listening and providing feedback as we went.)

  • There is, of course, a Twitter.

  • The Dithering branding brings warmth to my cold heart, and is the work of my and Ben’s good friend Brad Ellis. Hell yeah, Futura. Every designer agrees I’m easy to please and don’t let Brad tell you otherwise.

  • The Talk Show isn’t going anywhere. In fact there’s a new episode dropping tomorrow, with a first-time guest whom I’ve wanted to have on the show for years. Dithering isn’t replacing The Talk Show, it’s in addition to The Talk Show.

If that sounds good to you, I hope you subscribe — and when you do, I hope you enjoy listening to Dithering as much I’m enjoying making it. 

  1. You can hear the long version in my 2014 talk at XOXO. ↩︎

Thursday, 7 May 2020

‘Two Laptops, One Keyboard’ — Jason Snell Reviews the New 13-Inch MacBook Pro 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Since 2016, there have really been two different laptops living under the name “13-inch MacBook Pro.” There’s a lower-end model with two Thunderbolt 3 ports (on the left side), and a higher-end model with four ports (two on either side). Originally the lower-end model didn’t have a Touch Bar, but Apple added it to the low-end model last year.

There’s a big difference between the two models, one that’s been heightened with this set of updates. The low-end laptops start at $1299 and are powered by 8th-generation Intel processors. The high-end models start at $1799 and have received a boost to 10th-generation “Ice Lake” Intel processors. The low-end models are closer in base price to the $999 MacBook Air than to the high-end 13-inch MacBook Pro. […]

In any event, if you’re shopping for a new Apple laptop and you’re wary of the $1799 starting price of the high-end 13-inch MacBook Pro, you should consider the MacBook Air as well as the low-end Pro. They’re more alike than you might imagine, the Air is lighter and cheaper, and if you have no use for the Touch Bar, all the better.

Great review, and helps fill in the missing context that Apple’s “two laptops with one name” marketing inherently leaves out. Apple can’t really emphasize the differences between the two 13-inch MacBook Pros without making the low-end variant look bad. The high-end 13-inch MacBook Pro is the professional model. Faster and more modern processors, double the ports, up to 32 GB of RAM (and the RAM is faster too). The low-end models are something else altogether. They’re not bad MacBooks by any sense — but I genuinely wonder who they’re for. Most people who want a 13-inch MacBook should definitely get the new Air; those who want or need more performance should get the high-end MacBook Pro. I’m not sure who the people in the middle are, other than those who feel they should buy a MacBook with “Pro” in the name because that sounds better.

Fire up Apple’s excellent comparison page with all three 13-inch MacBooks: the Air, the 2-port Pro, and the 4-port Pro. Yes, the 2-port Pro has faster CPUs than the Air, but not by much. Otherwise, it really just looks like a thicker, heavier laptop that gets ~10 percent less battery life.

The 4-port 13-inch MacBook Pro, on the other hand, looks like the machine I’ve been waiting for for years.

Apple to Aid COPAN Diagnostics in Production of COVID-19 Testing Kits 

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced it is awarding $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a market leader in sample collection kits that play a critical role in COVID-19 testing. This funding will allow COPAN Diagnostics to rapidly accelerate their supply of sample collection kits for hospitals across the United States, expanding production from several thousand today to more than one million kits per week by early July. As part of this effort, Apple will support COPAN Diagnostics’ expansion to a new, larger facility in Southern California, with advanced equipment that Apple is helping design. […]

Norman Sharples, CEO of COPAN Diagnostics:

“Collection and transport kits are a critical component in the fight against COVID-19. At COPAN, we’re excited and grateful for this partnership with Apple as our strong beliefs of innovation, quality, and excellence in manufacturing and design are perfectly aligned. Apple’s operational expertise will help us increase delivery of important pre-analytical tools for medical professionals across the country at this critical time.”

The headlines — including Apple’s own — are about the $10 million. But anyone can give $10 million. What intrigues me here and might be unique to Apple is the operational assistance — help designing machines, help with production, help with procurement. Apple’s operational excellence is indisputably the best in the consumer electronics industry. If they can apply even a fraction of that expertise to a company like COPAN, it could make a significant difference in U.S. testing capacity.

‘Game Changer’ — New Banksy Piece Unveiled at Hospital to Thank Nurses and Doctors 

The AP:

The piece has been placed on display in a corridor at Southampton General Hospital in southern > The artist left a note for hospital workers, saying: “Thanks for all you’re doing. I hope this brightens the place up a bit, even if only black and white.”

Health officials said it was a “massive boost to morale” for everyone at the hospital, which has seen at least two members of staff die after contracting the new coronavirus.

Pitch perfect. I love the dithered close up texture of the details. Without question, in my mind, Banksy is the most important painter of our time.

Wednesday, 6 May 2020

‘Do. The. Work.’ 

Rick LePage:

It is, quite honestly, hard to fight it all. There is a reason that Monday seems like Tuesday, which seems like last Thursday, or Sunday. I can’t — and don’t care to — remember what happened then.

One recent night, during a bout of insomnia, I was hit with a stark thought. Actually, it was really more of a command:

“Get your mind working again.”

‘Unseen Is What Fuels the Imagination’ 

Om Malik:

The mysterious is what makes a great image for me. And perhaps that is why I end up making images, which leave a lot of room for others to imagine. It is why I like fog — because it creates room for all of us to get lost, in our own self, and go someplace, without leaving this place we call home.

Go full screen with these.

Facebook Server Update Causes iOS Apps That Use Their SDK to Crash on Launch 

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

There are multiple complaints about apps crashing continually on iOS devices on the MacRumors forums, and a wide range of apps appear to be impacted. Google’s Waze app, for example, won’t launch, and there have been complaints about apps that include Pinterest, Spotify, Adobe Spark, Quora, TikTok, and others.

Multiple developers on GitHub have attributed the problem to a Facebook software development kit used by the apps for sign-in purposes. Apps are failing to open even when users do not use the Facebook login options included.

No sympathy from me for any of the companies whose apps have been rendered useless by this bug. Facebook’s longstanding motto (and rare instance of corporate honesty from them) put it right on the tin: “Move fast and break things.”

Facebook themselves are no dummies. None of their iOS apps ever break because of a bug from Google or Adobe, because they’re not foolish enough to bake in a dependency they don’t control.

Matthew Panzarino: ‘How Apple Reinvented the Cursor for iPad’ 

Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

Even though Apple did not invent the mouse pointer, history has cemented its place in dragging it out of obscurity and into mainstream use. Its everyday utility, pioneered at Xerox Parc and later combined with a bit of iconic* work from Susan Kare at Apple, has made the pointer our avatar in digital space for nearly 40 years.

What a great lede. The best way to understand the breakthrough that was the 1984 Mac interface is that the on-screen pointer was the user’s avatar. That’s you. And you use the mouse to navigate around what you see on the screen.

Then, a few weeks ago, Apple dropped a new kind of pointer — a hybrid between these two worlds of pixels and pushes. The iPad’s cursor, I think, deserves closer examination. It’s a seminal bit of remixing from one of the most closely watched idea factories on the planet.

In order to dive a bit deeper on the brand new cursor and its interaction models, I spoke to Apple SVP Craig Federighi about its development and some of the choices by the teams at Apple that made it. First, let’s talk about some of the things that make the cursor so different from what came before … and yet strangely familiar.

I suspect what Apple has done with the mouse pointer on iPadOS is going to get ripped off far and wide. It’s too natural, too obviously correct.

Tuesday, 5 May 2020

Tim Bray Quit Amazon Over Firing of Whistleblowers 

Tim Bray:

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19. […]

Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.

At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

Bracing, cogent read. Hats off to Bray.

‘The Plan Is to Have No Plan’ 

Jay Rosen, writing at PressThink:

“The plan is to have no plan” is not a strategy, really. Nor would I call it a policy. It has a kind of logic to it, but this is different from saying it has a design — or a designer. Meaning: I do not want to be too conspiratorial about this. To wing it without a plan is merely the best this government can do, given who heads the table. The manufacture of confusion is just the ruins of Trump’s personality meeting the powers of the presidency. There is no genius there, only a damaged human being playing havoc with our lives.

Exactly. There is no there there. Our seemingly inexplicable nationwide dearth of testing capability is in fact explicable: more tests = more confirmed cases, and Trump has told us, straight up, in one of his daily instances of saying aloud what anyone with any shame would never utter in private, let alone in front of the world, that his concern isn’t with the welfare of Americans, but rather with the welfare of “the numbers”. He wanted to leave sick Americans on an infected cruise ship not because it was deemed the best course of action epidemiologically, but because “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.” That’s why we don’t have tests. That’s not conspiratorial, that’s just listening to what Trump has told us.

Rosen’s piece is so extraordinarily brief — plans are hard to describe, no-plans not so much — that it’s hard not to quote the whole thing. But his opening is worth considering too:

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible […]

How could anyone expect or hope that thousands of deaths a day, every day, could ever become normal? you might ask, because you are a caring person with a capacity for empathy. But we allow all sorts of unthinkable things to become normal.

They Might as Well Have Gone the Whole Nine Yards and Put a Red MAGA Hat on Lincoln 

Katie Rogers, reporting for The New York Times:

There was just one catch: While Mr. Trump and many other presidents have hosted inauguration concerts and gatherings on the memorial’s steps, any event meant to draw an audience inside the interior near Daniel Chester French’s sculpture of a seated Lincoln is prohibited. The area beginning with the marble staircase where the columns start constitutes a boundary protected by federal law.

So on Sunday, when the president sat down with two Fox News anchors at Lincoln’s marbled feet during a coronavirus-focused virtual “town hall,” it was because a directive issued by David Bernhardt, the secretary of the interior, had allowed them to do so.

Mr. Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist whose Senate nomination was contested by Democrats who pointed to multiple accusations of conflicts of interest and ethical violations, ordered the memorial temporarily closed for the event, citing the coronavirus.

“Given the extraordinary crisis that the American people have endured, and the need for the president to exercise a core governmental function to address the nation about an ongoing public-health crisis,” Mr. Bernhardt wrote in an order issued Friday, “I am exercising my authority to facilitate the opportunity for the president to conduct this address within the Lincoln Memorial.”

This was a campaign event, no more, no less. We could argue about it if there had been reporters from even a single legitimate non-state media outlet, but even then we should be opposed — and there were in fact no real reporters. The mere idea of holding this event inside the Lincoln Memorial is disgraceful, let alone that it went through. Our national memorials are sacred ground — not in any religious sense, but in a civic sense. Their symbolism is meaningful.

Washington Post Poll: ‘Americans Widely Oppose Reopening Most Businesses, Despite Easing of Restrictions in Some States’ 

Dan Balz and Emily Guskin, reporting for The Washington Post:

The Post-U. Md. poll asked about the following types of businesses: gun stores, dine-in restaurants, nail salons, barbershops and hair salons, retail establishments such as clothing stores, along with gyms, golf courses and movie theaters.

The most significant opposition is to reopening movie theaters, with 82 percent of Americans saying they should not be allowed to open up in their state. There is also broad opposition to reopening gyms (78 percent opposed), dine-in restaurants and nail salons (both with 74 percent opposed).

Gun stores are next, with 70 percent saying they should not be reopened, followed by barbershops and hair salons (69 percent opposed) and retail shops such as clothing stores (66 percent opposed) and golf courses (59 percent opposed).

These are far larger majorities than we typically see in polls regarding ostensibly controversial issues here in the U.S. These mandates to keep nonessential businesses closed are in fact broadly popular. The nation is not divided on this.

It’s never wise to gauge public opinion solely by looking at protests, but in this particular case it could not possibly be more misleading. By definition, only the people who think these restrictions are nonsense/unnecessary/too broad/whatever are even willing to congregate in large groups. You can’t hold a public rally in support of stay-at-home orders.

Angry incoherent mobs make for good TV, alas. A massive majority of Americans — patiently staying at home, listening to the advice of experts — does not.

Tot and Accessibility 

Craig Hockenberry, writing at The Iconfactory blog:

Luckily we have a tool that let me approximate what Jason was seeing. xScope’s vision defect simulator confirmed that Tot’s colored circles had serious issues. We had a new kind of accessibility problem and one that went to the heart of the app’s visual design. […]

This began an exploration on how Tot’s colorful rings could change, while keeping the existing “dot” metaphor, a strong visual navigation element.

Such a great example of how first-class accessibility and exuberant custom UI design don’t have to be at odds, but in fact can go hand-in-hand.

WWDC 2020 Swift Student Challenge 

New contest for student developers as part of WWDC 2020:

Create an interactive scene in a Swift playground that can be experienced within three minutes. Be creative. If you need inspiration, use the templates in Swift Playgrounds or Xcode for a head start on more advanced creations. Make them your own by adding graphics, audio, and more.

WWDC 2020 Kickoff: June 22 

The memoji developer theme is fun — it emphasizes the unique virtual nature of this year’s WWDC, and each time you reload the page you get a different set of developers.

From the Apple Newsroom announcement:

Developers are encouraged to download the Apple Developer app where additional WWDC20 program information — including keynote and Platforms State of the Union details, session and lab schedules, and more — will be shared in June. Information will also be made available on the Apple Developer website and by email.

No surprise that they’re holding the session schedule close to their vest. I’m still deeply curious how labs will work in an open “everyone is invited” format. WWDC labs get crowded with 5,000 physical attendees; I have no idea how anything similar could work with untold tens of thousands of virtual attendees.

Apple’s official Developer app is available for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV — still no app for Mac, despite the fact that every single developer working on Apple platforms uses Xcode, which only works on Mac (well, at the moment, before WWDC). I could have sworn Apple announced some sort of framework that made it super-easy to turn an iPad app into a great Mac app at some point.

Monday, 4 May 2020

Unboxing the Mac Pro Wheels 

Nice take from Lew Hilsenteger.

New 13-Inch MacBook Pros 

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today updated the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the new Magic Keyboard for the best typing experience ever on a Mac notebook and doubled the storage across all standard configurations, delivering even more value to the most popular MacBook Pro. The new lineup also offers 10th-generation processors for up to 80 percent faster graphics performance and makes 16GB of faster 3733MHz memory standard on select configurations.

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

Aside from the doubling of storage and new keyboard, the $1299 and $1499 models of the 13-inch MacBook Pro remain largely untouched. They feature the same 8th-generation Core i5 processor running at 1.4 GHz as their predecessors. They can be configured with an 8th-generation 1.7GHz Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of SSD storage.

The $1799 and $1999 models, on the other hand, now feature the 10th-generation Core i5 processor at 2.0GHz. Additional options include a bump to a 10th-generation Core i7 processor at 2.3GHz, 32 GB of RAM, and up to 4TB of SSD storage — the latter two options are available on this model for the first time. This model can also drive an external display at up to 6K resolution; the lower-end models are limited to one external 5K display or two external 4K displays.

All models feature the same wide stereo sound and Dolby Atmos support as their 16-inch counterpart, though the 13-inch models lack the six-speaker array. They also feature the beamforming three-mic setup.

So ends the saga of the butterfly-switch keyboards, and so much for the pervasive rumors that the smaller MacBook Pro would shift from 13-inch to 14-inch displays, the way the 15 went to 16.

Sunday, 3 May 2020

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice From Kevin Kelly 

Kevin Kelly:

It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ’uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.

Wisdom, concentrated. And what makes it a delightful read is the recurring themes aren’t grouped together.

‘The Cancer in the Camera Lens’ 

David Roth, writing for The New Republic:

In close up, on television, at a glance, with the volume down, Donald Trump can from time to time look like a president. That effect becomes less convincing the more you pay attention, though. Even under professional lighting, Trump reliably looks like a photographic negative of himself; on his worse and wetter days, he has the tone and texture of those lacquered roast ducks that hang from hooks in Chinatown restaurant windows. The passing presidentiality of the man dissipates utterly in longer shots, where Trump can be seen standing tipped oddly forward like a jowly ski jumper in midair, or mincing forward to bum-rush an expert’s inconvenient answer with an incoherent one of his own, or just making faces intended to signal that he is listening very strongly to what someone else is saying. (These slapdash performances of executive seriousness tend to have the effect, as the comedian Stewart Lee once said of James Corden, of making Trump look like “a dog listening to classical music.”) Seen from this long-shot vantage, the man at the podium is unmistakably Donald Trump — uncanny, unknowing, upset about various things that he can’t quite understand or express.

Merlin Mann:

We’re going to remember David Roth as the writer who most nailed this era. The one who best heard the tonal clams that were repeatedly hit and was uniquely gifted at describing how it all felt as it was happening.

Only 2 Percent of Steam Users Own VR Headsets 

Zack Zwiezen, Kotaku:

Still, even after one of the largest spikes in VR usage in Steam history, less than 2% of Steam users are using HMDs. VR is expensive, not viable for everyone, and relies on powerful PC hardware. Thinking about these factors and looking at these numbers, it makes sense why folks are trying to mod Half-Life: Alyx to make it playable without a VR headset.

Puts some context into Valve’s decision to drop Mac support from SteamVR.

Saturday, 2 May 2020

‘Psychic Paper’, an Extraordinarily Powerful But Easily Understood iOS Exploit 

“Siguza”:

Yesterday Apple released iOS 13.5 beta 3 (seemingly renaming iOS 13.4.5 to 13.5 there), and that killed one of my bugs. It wasn’t just any bug though, it was the first 0day I had ever found. And it was probably also the best one. Not necessarily for how much it gives you, but certainly for how much I’ve used it for, and also for how ridiculously simple it is. So simple, in fact, that the [proof-of-concept] I tweeted out looks like an absolute joke. But it’s 100% real.

I dubbed it “psychic paper” because, just like the item by that name that Doctor Who likes to carry, it allows you get past security checks and make others believe you have a wide range of credentials that you shouldn’t have.

In contrast to virtually any other bug and any other exploit I’ve had to do with, this one should be understandable without any background knowledge in iOS and/or exploitation. In that spirit, I’ll also try and write this post in a manner that assumes no iOS- or exploitation-specific knowledge. I do expect you however to loosely know what XML, public key encryption and hashes are, and understanding C code is certainly a big advantage.

So strap in for the story of what I’ll boldly claim to be the most elegant exploit for the most powerful sandbox escape on iOS yet.

What a crazy bug, and Siguza’s explanation is very cogent. Basically, it comes down to this:

  1. XML is terrible.
  2. iOS uses XML for Plists, and Plists are used everywhere in iOS (and MacOS).
  3. iOS’s sandboxing system depends upon three different XML parsers, which interpret slightly invalid XML input in slightly different ways.

So Siguza’s exploit — which granted an app full access to the entire file system, and more — uses malformed XML comments constructed in a way that one of iOS’s XML parsers sees its declaration of entitlements one way, and another XML parser sees it another way. The XML parser used to check whether an application should be allowed to launch doesn’t see the fishy entitlements because it thinks they’re inside a comment. The XML parser used to determine whether an already running application has permission to do things that require entitlements sees the fishy entitlements and grants permission.

(On a personal note, it pleases me greatly how nicely readable Siguza’s Markdown source is for this report.)

Automatic, Makers of Diagnostic Car Dingus, to Shut Down 

Automatic:

Just like many other companies in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted our business. With fewer consumers purchasing and leasing vehicles and drivers on the road, we unfortunately do not see a path forward for our business. These are unprecedented times, and with so much uncertainty ahead, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue the Automatic connected car product, service and platform. We will be shutting down all operations at 11:59 pm, PT, on May 28, 2020 and, as a result, your service will end on that time.

A shame. Automatic was, a few years back, a regular sponsor of The Talk Show, and their diagnostic dingus, app, and service were all excellent. (Their last episode as a sponsor was the November 2016 post-election “Holiday Party” with Merlin Mann.)

Update: I either missed or forgot this, but in 2017 Automatic was acquired by SiriusXM for “a little north of $100 million”. Poof.

Friday, 1 May 2020

Seems Pretty Clear That if Anything Is ‘Too High’ It’s Elon Musk 

Tim Higgins, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (+):

The latest episode on Twitter began Friday, at 8:10 a.m. California time where Tesla is based, Mr. Musk wrote on his verified Twitter account: “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.” A minute later, he added: “Tesla stock price is too high imo” — an abbreviation for “in my opinion.”

Tesla shares, which had closed Thursday at $781.88, an 82% gain for the year, were down more than 9% in midday trading Friday after the Twitter messages. […]

Because of his history on Twitter, he is required by a court settlement to vet any message that might be material to Tesla, though the definition of what exactly must be reviewed has been a subject of dispute. Asked whether he was joking or if he’d had his tweet vetted before posting it, Mr. Musk told The Wall Street Journal in an email simply: “No.”

Pretty sure these should have been “reviewed”.

Steam Drops MacOS From VR Support 

Steam:

SteamVR has ended OSX support so our team can focus on Windows and Linux.

You can see how relevant Steam has considered the Mac to VR gaming by the fact that they call it “OSX” — a name they misspelled and which Apple changed four years ago.

Update: The page now reads:

SteamVR has ended macOS support so our team can focus on Windows and Linux.

Nice to see that Steam cares.

Also, to be clear, I don’t blame Steam one bit. If anything, it’s surprising Steam “supported” the Mac for VR up until now. No Macs ship with a video card that supports VR gaming, and MacOS doesn’t support the Vulkan or OpenXR APIs that popular VR games are built on. It doesn’t help (to put it mildly) that Nvidia and Apple remain at odds. Apple is doing its own thing with Metal and ARKit — which are both excellent, but not part of the VR gaming world. Lots of good commentary here in this thread.

The Newman Design Process Squiggle 

Damien Newman:

Years ago I dropped a simple illustration into a proposal to convey the design process to a client. It was meant to illustrate the characteristics of the process we were to embark on, making it clear to them that it might be uncertain in the beginning, but in the end we’d focus on a single point of clarity. It seemed to work. And from then on, I’ve used it since. Many many times.

My father told me that the design process started with the abstract, moved to the concept and then finally the design. So I used to use these three words, back in the day, to convey the process of design to my unsuspecting clients. It wasn’t as effective — even if I knew what it meant. So I found myself saying, “Here — it looks like this…” and drawing the squiggle.

I don’t know how I’ve gone so long without ever seeing this before, but it’s brilliant in its clarity and obvious truth. When I make something new, I don’t expect to jump right to the design, but I do feel like I should be able to start with the concept. I’m repulsed by the uncertainty and messiness of that first stage, but this diagram is a wonderful reminder that it is unavoidable. Might as well just dive in. Embrace the unavoidable.

I really could have used this a few weeks ago for a new thing I’m working on now.

Update: Newman has a dedicated website for the illustration, which he’s made available under a Creative Commons license.

Thursday, 30 April 2020

The Talk Show: ‘Some Kind of Sandwich’ 

Dieter Bohn joins the show to talk about the iPad Magic Keyboard, the new iPhone SE, and the state of Android flagship phones.

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Francisco Tolmasky on the iPad Getting Graded on a Curve 

Francisco Tolmasky, in a tweet thread:

The frustrating thing about the iPad is that I constantly feel that I need to be buying into a philosophy. There’s rarely a good reason for why I can’t do something other than me “not getting what the iPad is about”. This never happens with the Mac or the iPhone.

The limitations of the iPhone feel earned due to the nature of the device. You can get away with a lot because it feels amazing that I can get this much done in this form factor to begin with. But the iPad form factor is basically the same as a laptop, so it deserves no slack.

This thread resonated deeply with me, and gets to some of the UI design issues with iPadOS I’ve been trying to express recently. I think he makes one mistake — he mixes in complaints about the Magic Keyboard accessory with complaints about iPadOS conceptually. (He’s frustrated that you can’t fold the Magic Keyboard open like a book, like you can with the Smart Keyboard.) Without putting words in Tolmasky’s mouth, I think he lumped in a critique of the Magic Keyboard on the grounds that the ways the it makes you more productive on an iPad ought not require a heavy, expensive, inflexible keyboard stand to achieve. But to me it waters down the basic argument.

Two things I’ve noted with irritation this week, while trying to do more daily work on iPad:

  • The Command-Tab switcher only shows the 8 most recent apps. Why? It’s surprising how often I bump into this limit, trying to switch to an app that has bounced off the end of this short list. (On my MacBook Pro, where I’m typing this, I currently have 33 apps in the Command-Tab switcher. Is that excessive? Sure. But MacOS just shrugs its shoulders.)

  • On the Mac, just about anywhere you want to be able to search for text, you can search for text. ⌘F invokes a search field in almost every app that displays or edits text. On iPad, it’s rare. Notably, Mail. Why in the world can you not search for a string of text within the current message in Mail? Mail on iPad is phone-class email, not desktop-class email. But it’s not like Mail is some unusual exception to this — on iPad the exceptions are the places where ⌘F does work. To borrow Tomalsky’s phrasing, iPad deserves no slack on this.

  • Bonus third gripe, related to the second: What you can search for in Mail on iPad — searching not within the current message but across all messages — stinks. “Your next computer is not a computer” is catchy; “Your next computer can’t search for email messages” not so much.

Update: More from Tolmasky, following up on my post here.

Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera — 12 MP Sensor and Interchangeable Lenses 

Les Pounder, writing for Tom’s Hardware:

The Raspberry Pi Camera Module is one of those add ons that we love to play with. Creating images and videos using a $35 Raspberry Pi in real time is still mind blowing for most. You can even use your Raspberry Pi as a PC webcam. But the two previous first-party camera modules have suffered with a fixed focus, albeit good quality, lens and fragile construction.

Enter the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera, a new module that ups the image quality with a new 12-MP sensor and supports interchangeable lenses and tripod-mounting. The module is larger and, at $50 without any of the required lenses, quite a bit more expensive than prior models, but the increased resolution and flexibility make it a great choice for photography-intensive projects.

With so much of the computer industry moving away from hobbyist tinkering, Raspberry Pi is a delightful exception. I don’t know what I’d do with this but I want to do something.

Apple Q2 2020 Results: $58B Revenue, but No Guidance for Next Quarter 

Jason Snell:

Apple on Thursday announced that it generated $58B in revenue during its second fiscal quarter. Services revenue was up again, wearables revenue was up again, and iPhone, Mac, and iPad were down. The company declined to give guidance on what it thought would happen during the current quarter, given how uncertain the world economy and pandemic situation are.

Charts! We’ve got many of them below.

Two quick notes that jumped out at me:

  • Services (23%) now account for quite a bit more of Apple’s revenue than Mac and iPad combined (9% and 7%).

  • The iPhone fell at exactly 50% of revenue. Services will soon be half as big a business as iPhone. Part of this is that iPhone revenue was down 7% year-over-year, and Services revenue isn’t cyclical and simply continues to grow. It was never true from a functional standpoint, but even from a financial standpoint, Apple should no longer be seen as The iPhone Company.

Regarding the Washington Post’s Poll on Americans’ Willingness to Use Smartphone Apps for Exposure Notification 

Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell, and Alauna Safarpour, reporting for The Washington Post:

Among the 82 percent of Americans who do have smartphones, willingness to use an infection-tracing app is split evenly, with 50 percent saying they definitely or probably would use such an app and an equal percentage saying they probably or definitely would not. Willingness runs highest among Democrats and people reporting they are worried about a covid-19 infection making them seriously ill. Resistance is higher among Republicans and people reporting a lower level of personal worry about getting the virus.

Imagine how this number might change if Apple and Google offered, say, $5 in credit for the iTunes and Play stores for anyone who enabled the system setting and installed an exposure notification app from their local government. Or if Google and Apple jointly create some TV commercials to promote this effort while simultaneously explaining how private it is.

A major source of skepticism about the infection-tracing apps is distrust of Google, Apple and tech companies generally, with a majority expressing doubts about whether they would protect the privacy of health data. A 57 percent majority of smartphone users report having a “great deal” or a “good amount” of trust in public health agencies, and 56 percent trust universities. That compares with 47 percent who trust health insurance companies and 43 percent who trust tech companies like Google and Apple.

The results of this poll are getting a lot of press, but this paragraph shows just how fundamentally flawed the questions were. The pollsters who wrote the questions and these reporters from the Post clearly have no idea what Apple and Google are actually doing. Apple and Google are not making an “app”. They’re creating system-level APIs so that official government health agencies around the world can create apps. So if people trust public health agencies more than they trust Apple and Google, that actually means they are already more likely to trust such apps, when they become available, because the apps will bear the imprimatur of their respective local health agencies.

This shit is important, let’s get it right.

How the Apple-Google Exposure Notification Project Came Together 

Christina Farr, reporting for CNBC:

In mid-March, with Covid-19 spreading to almost every country in the world, a small team at Apple started brainstorming how they could help. They knew that smartphones would be key to the global coronavirus response, particularly as countries started relaxing their shelter-in-place orders. To prepare for that, governments and private companies were building so-called “contact tracing” apps to monitor citizens’ movements and determine whether they might have come into contact with someone infected with the virus.

Within a few weeks, the Apple project — code-named “Bubble” — had dozens of employees working on it with executive-level support from two sponsors: Craig Federighi, a senior vice president of software engineering, and Jeff Williams, the company’s chief operating officer and de-facto head of healthcare. By the end of the month, Google had officially come on board, and about a week later, the companies’ two CEOs Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai met virtually to give their final vote of approval to the project.

Not a ton of internal details, but fascinating nonetheless. I don’t see why anyone is expressing surprise over Apple and Google collaborating on this, though. Of course they are. There are dozens of reasons for informed people to be cynical about both Apple and Google. But there’s really no reason at all to be cynical about this effort. Both companies are showing their work. We can verify from their published specs not only that these new exposure notification APIs are not intended for any sort of nefarious purposes, but that they can’t be.

Sometimes the simple explanation is the truth: Apple and Google are trying to do the best they can to help. That means working fast, working together, and designing a system that protects users’ privacy and engenders trust.

Wednesday, 29 April 2020

Another iOS 13.5 Beta Tweak: An Option to Disable ‘Automatic Prominence’ for the Current Speaker’s Tile in Group FaceTime 

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

Secondly, Apple is adding a toggle in iOS 13.5 allowing you to disable the “enlarge the face of the speaker” feature in Group FaceTime calls, which comes as a great relief to anybody who has used, and potentially become nauseated by, this feature. However, it’s not disabled by default (boo), so you’re still going to have to walk all your less tech-savvy relatives through how to turn this off.

This feature sounds clever and makes for a fun demo, but methinks a lot of folks at Apple (executives included) are using group FaceTime chats more than ever before lately, and have realized that in practice, especially in larger groups, it’s not a good experience.

New iOS 13.5 Beta Speeds Up Unlocking With Passcode When Wearing a Mask 

Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors:

In the iOS 13.5 beta, released this morning, Apple has streamlined the speed with which the passcode pops up when a person wearing a mask is detected, making it easier to get into an iPhone with a passcode when Face ID fails.

Speedier access to the passcode interface is noticeable when you swipe upwards on the Home screen when unlocking the iPhone, as this action now immediately brings up the passcode interface if your face is covered by a mask. Previously, the iPhone would attempt to initiate Face ID first, creating a few seconds of delay before the passcode interface was shown. The new, speedier passcode entry method makes it quicker to get into an iPhone.

I think it is still trying Face ID first, but if it looks like you’re wearing a face mask, it gives up and goes straight to the passphrase screen. The difference is that until now, it would keep trying Face ID for a few extra seconds.

Update: iOS 13.5 is clearly going to make this better by just skipping right to the passphrase screen, but it turns out you can jump to that screen immediately in the current version of iOS just by tapping the “Face ID” text label in the center of the screen. I had no idea this text acted like a button, and never would have guessed that it did. If only there were some way that on-screen elements that act like buttons could be made to look like buttons…

David Letterman on Mike Pence Not Wearing Mask at Mayo Clinic 

The Hollywood Reporter:

Letterman, who noted the wife of his former musical director Paul Shaffer was hospitalized with COVID-19, lambasted Pence for the move.

“Now if you go to the Mayo Clinic because you have COVID-19, you really have it,” Letterman said. “[Pence] takes time off from his gig as a mannequin, and he’s walking around without a mask taunting these poor people who are bedridden and wearing a mask. To me, that is just taunting people who are ill, to see that guy walking around in his $40 suit walking around in the Mayo Clinic without a mask.”

Letterman joked that he had intel that Trump would not wear a mask because his aides couldn’t figure out how to attach it to his hair.

Man, if only Letterman still had a show. He was doing episodes of his late night talk show from unusual locations long before now, when all the late night talk shows have to be shot from unusual locations.

Tuesday, 28 April 2020

Joanna Stern Reviews the New iPhone SE 

“Note: Actual iPhone SE does not talk or have a face” — without question, the funniest video review of the iPhone SE last week. Her column for the WSJ is spot-on too (+), emphasizing that, low price aside, design-wise it is exactly the iPhone a lot of potential buyers are looking for.

Rene Ritchie: iPhone SE vs. iPhone 8 

Great idea for a video: just compare the new SE to its near-lookalike predecessor, the iPhone 8. Even if price is your biggest concern, no deal on a new iPhone 8 remaining in channel inventory is a better value than $400 for a new SE in my opinion. For the price-conscious, the fact that the SE has an extra two years of legroom on software updates is a huge factor.

Marques Brownlee Reviews the New iPhone SE 

Fun, insightful, well-illustrated review, as usual. His review unit was red, naturally.

WSJ: ‘Bill Comes Due for Overextended Airbnb Hosts’ 

Tripp Mickle and Preetika Rana, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

For years, Cheryl Dopp considered the ding on her phone from a new Airbnb Inc. booking to be the sound of what she called “magical money.” A property she rented out in Jersey City, N.J., on Airbnb could gross more than $8,000 a month, she said, double what long-term tenants would pay.

Now, Ms. Dopp associates the dings with cancellations and financial misery. The 54-year-old information-technology contractor said she had about $10,000 in bookings evaporate overnight in March. She has $22,000 in monthly expenses for a largely Airbnb portfolio, she said, that included another Jersey City home and a house in Miami.

Good apartments have always been hard to find — harder in some cities than others, of course — but Airbnb has consumed many rental markets. $8,000 in Airbnb rentals for a $4,000 apartment is great if you own the apartment, but devastating for local residents looking for, you know, a place to live. In a handful of years, Airbnb went from a service that let you make money from renting out a spare bedroom to a market dominated by speculators.

I don’t blame the speculators for getting while the getting was good. But now that the short-term rental market has completely vanished, I have absolutely zero sympathy for them, either.

(Apple News link for News+ subscribers.)

iPhone SE’s Haptic Touch Doesn’t Work in Notification Center, Apparently by Design 

A lot of complaints about this, and rightly so, from folks upgrading to the new SE from older iPhones that supported 3D Touch. I didn’t take note of this while reviewing the SE, because I didn’t realize (or remember really) that older phones in the 6/7/8 form factor used 3D Touch for acting on notifications. You can get to the same actions by swiping right to left on a notification and tapping the View button, but still. If the SE supports Haptic Touch at all — and it does — I don’t understand why it wouldn’t support Haptic Touch events for notifications.

There are a lot of small differences between the pre-iPhone-X user interface and post-iPhone-X user interface in iOS. When I first heard about this issue with notifications on the SE, I thought it was something that wasn’t supported in the pre-X interface. But it is — but only on phones with 3D Touch. But the whole thing with 3D Touch and Haptic Touch is so confusing, and has been handled so poorly by Apple in terms of how 3D Touch was used in iOS and which devices had it and which did not (no iPad ever had 3D Touch, for example), that you can’t possibly expect regular iPhone buyers to understand that the reason the new SE doesn’t support long-pressing notifications to act on them is that (a) it has the pre-X Touch ID user interface, and (b) doesn’t have 3D Touch. I’m not even entirely sure that that’s the full explanation for why this is, and it’s my job to stay on top of stuff like this. All I know is that there is only one iPhone in Apple’s current lineup that doesn’t support long-pressing notifications and that phone is the SE, the very newest model, and that doesn’t make sense.

The 2020 iPhone SE

Wednesday, 22 April 2020

The 2020 iPhone SE is a device where, for the most part, what you see is what you get. The one thing you get that you can’t see is the A13 Bionic chip — although you can see, particularly with Portrait Mode photography, what the A13 makes possible in the SE.

Let’s start with the outside.

Close your eyes and the SE feels identical to the iPhone 8: same materials, same button placement, same size (down to the 10th of a millimeter — the iPhones SE and 8 are 100 percent case compatible), same weight (148 g).

Open your eyes and you’ll notice the coloring is different, if you’re looking at the white model. The white SE has a black front face. There’s some prior art for this — the white iPhone 3G and 3GS models also had black front faces. But starting with the iPhone 4,1 white/light-colored iPhones equipped with home buttons have had white front panels, except for the iPhone 5C. I have never cared for those white front panels — I don’t like the way they emphasize, rather than hide, the elements embedded in the iPhone’s forehead: the speaker, the camera, the flash. It’d be bad enough if those elements were symmetrically arranged but they’re not — the camera is off center. The black front face is simply a better look, to my eyes. And it doesn’t hurt that when the display is off, the black front disguises the now-dated forehead and chin above and below the screen.

Apple’s Product Red iPhone 8 was introduced 6 months after the other colors, and it too sported a black front face. It’s a sharp look. My iPhone SE review unit is white, and I think it looks much nicer than the “silver” iPhone 8, which, to my eyes, plays as off-white on the back panel. Pure white looks better, and Apple nailed it with the iPhone SE.

A silver iPhone 8 and white iPhone SE, faces down.

There’s one more cosmetic improvement: the back panel of the iPhone 8 sported an Apple logo, centered vertically between the volume buttons, and the word “iPhone” at the corresponding position toward the bottom.2 Like its iPhone 11 brethren models, the iPhone SE’s back panel markings have been reduced to the essential minimum: just the Apple logo, perfectly centered. Everyone who is going to put their new SE in a case and never remove it should take a moment to appreciate the purity of this design before they do.

Like the iPhone 5-style 2016 iPhone SE before it, the new iPhone 6-style iPhone SE feels like the canonical ideal of the form factor it embodies.

Performance

Because I recently reviewed the updated iPad Pros, I had it in my mind that the A13 system-on-a-chip isn’t that much faster than the A12. Not true.

I had that erroneous notion in mind because the iPad Pros have the A12Z. Now, it’s definitely the case that the new A12Z chips are only ever-so-slightly improved over the A12X chips in the 2018 iPad Pros — CPU performance is identical, and GPU performance is improved only by going from 7 cores to 8. And because the A12X and Z chips in iPad Pros have more CPU cores than the A12 chip in the iPhone XS and XR models, they perform better on benchmarks. In my benchmarks for the new iPad Pro, I was comparing the A13 against A12X/Z in iPad Pros, not the “plain” A12 in the iPhone XS and XR.

When you compare iPhones to iPhones, it’s quite obvious that the A13 is remarkably more performant than the A12. Geekbench 5 results, averaged over a few runs and rounded to account for variability (single- and multi-core benchmarks test the CPU, “compute” tests the GPU):

Chip Single Multi Compute
2020 iPhone SE A13 1,330 3,325 6,370
iPhone 11 Pro A13 1,330 3,340 6,350
iPhone XR A12 1,090 2,425 4,490
iPhone 8 A11 910 2,170 3,420
 
2020 iPad Pro A12Z 1,125 4,690 10,050
2019 16″ MBP i9 1,265 7,275 25,350

So, yes, a $400 iPhone SE bests a $3,000 top-of-the-line MacBook Pro in single-core CPU performance.

Camera

Benchmarks only measure CPU and GPU performance. The biggest improvement from the A12 to the A13 might be the Neural Engine, used for machine learning, which in practice means AR and photography. You can’t put a simple number on it like a benchmark score, but there are tangible features it enables, most noticeably with Portrait Mode photography.

Apple is calling the new SE camera its “best single-imaging system ever”. It has just one rear-facing camera lens and sensor, and that sensor (but not the lens) is apparently the same as that in the iPhone XR.

When Apple’s Portrait Mode first appeared, it required a dual-imaging system — either two cameras (on the rear) or a camera and Face ID TrueDepth system (on the front). This makes intuitive sense — we all know that our own depth perception is impaired significantly if we close one eye. Doing it with nothing but a single camera lens requires what Apple terms “monocular depth estimation”.

The iPhone XR does monocular depth estimation with its rear camera. The iPhone SE does it with both its rear and front-facing cameras. The results are rather amazing, really. Apple’s built-in Camera app only supports Portrait Mode for human subjects with the iPhone SE (both front and rear) — no inanimate objects, and, alas, no pets. The reason why, quite obviously, is that this monocular depth estimation is powered in large part, if not entirely, by a machine learning model optimized specifically for human faces. Using the third-party Halide camera app, however, allows you to shoot photos of anything with an accompanying depth map. Halide also allows you to view this depth map. It’s clear to me, but well beyond the scope of this review to examine in detail, that the iPhone SE’s rear-facing camera is capable of much more accurate depth maps than the iPhone XR’s. Since they’re both single-imaging systems and the same (or very similar) sensors, the SE’s superior depth mapping can only be attributed to the A13’s much more powerful neural engine.

I find this even more impressive with the SE’s front-facing camera. Self portraits using Portrait Mode’s advanced lighting effects are quite comparable between the SE and the iPhone 11 Pro. Below are side-by-side “Stage Light Mono” examples of yours truly, taken with front-facing cameras on the SE and 11 Pro. In the first two, I was standing next to a window on a sunny day; in the next two, I was in the same sunny room, but away from the windows. No editing was performed on any of the files, other than to use Photos to export HEIC originals as JPEGs, and to rescale the versions embedded below using Retrobatch.

iPhone 11 Pro (original JPEG file):

iPhone SE (original JPEG file):

iPhone 11 Pro (original JPEG file):

iPhone SE (original JPEG file):

I include no comparative examples from the iPhone XR because the iPhone XR doesn’t support any of the background-masking Portrait Mode lighting effects — no Stage Light, Stage Light Mono, or High-Key Light Mono.

Update: Whoops, actually the XR does support those effects, but only for the front-facing camera, which has the TrueDepth system.

To my eyes the SE does a very credible job compared to the 11 Pro. You can see the differences most obviously on my shoulders. And remember, the 11 Pro front-facing Portrait Mode is aided by the TrueDepth sensors from the Face ID system. The iPhone SE is doing this with just a single camera and a presumably very advanced machine learning model.3

Experience

Spending a week with the iPhone SE, after two and a half years using an iPhone X, then XS, now 11 Pro, has been, well, a bit frustrating.

A while back, I was talking with someone at Apple who had worked on the iPhone X. The X wasn’t just a fork in the iPhone hardware — Face ID instead of Touch ID, OLED instead of LCD, round-cornered edge-to-edge displays instead of sharp-cornered rectangles, etc. — but the fact that it didn’t even have a home button at all necessitated a rethinking of the fundamental software interface too.

OK, it wasn’t necessary per se. What Apple could have done, in theory, was replace the hardware home button with a virtual on-screen home button that worked just like the hardware home buttons on previous iPhones. Maybe that’s what they would have done with the iPhone X’s “all screen” design if they couldn’t figure out something better than a home button.

But they did figure out a better design. An all-new fundamental paradigm for the basic operation of using an iPhone: swipe up from the bottom to go home, swipe up more for the multitasking switcher, and animate the user interface as you swipe to make it look and feel like you’re directly manipulating the apps on screen, not indirectly applying gesture shortcuts as though the touchscreen were just a trackpad.

What this source told me is that while developing the iPhone X, members of the team would typically carry two phones with them: a prototype iPhone X they could use, but (of course) not while in the presence of anyone who wasn’t disclosed on the project, and an older iPhone they could use in front of anyone. These team members would spend time, every day, using both phones. They knew they were onto a winning idea with the new interaction design for the iPhone X when they started instinctively using the X-style gestures on the older iPhone, and never vice versa. When a new design is clearly better than an old one, it’s a one-way street mentally.

I believed that then, but I believe it more now after spending the last week with the iPhone SE. I’ve used it exclusively for hours at a stretch and I never stopped expecting it to act like a post-iPhone-X device. I swipe up from the bottom to go home or multitask. I expect it to wake up just by tapping anywhere on the display. I pull down from the top right corner expecting to see Control Center. I can’t stop doing any of these things unless I’m consciously thinking about the fact that I’m using an old-style iPhone. Even if I locked my personal iPhone 11 Pro in a drawer and touched no phone other than the new SE for a week or two, I still wouldn’t shake my iPhone X interaction habits unless I abandoned my iPad Pro too.

Once you get used to the post-iPhone-X interaction model, there’s no going back. A week with the new SE has not shaken my belief that the X-style interaction design is superior. Not one iota.4

But that’s OK. The new iPhone SE is not intended for anyone who has already switched to an iPhone X or later. It’s not a phone for enthusiasts, unless your enthusiasm is for the smallest phone you can get, or if price is a significant concern. The users the SE is targeting are upgrading from an older Touch ID iPhone or an Android phone.

It’s quite remarkable that the $400 iPhone SE significantly outperforms — and to a lesser but still noticeable degree, out-photographs — the $600 iPhone XR, both of which prices are for 64 GB base models. It’s even more remarkable that you can upgrade all the way to a 256 GB iPhone SE for $550, which is still less than the XR base model. But the XR has one obvious advantage: screen real estate. With the same text size, the XR shows significantly more vertical content:

An iPhone SE next to an iPhone XR, both showing the Settings → Display and Brightness screen.

But no one considering an iPhone SE is unaware of its size. SE buyers are either buying one despite its smaller size or because of it.

The iPhone SE is an excellent value if you’re fine with the smaller display and Touch ID instead of Face ID. It’s an astoundingly good value if you flat-out prefer the smaller form factor and familiar Touch ID experience.5 

  1. The white model of which proved to be surprisingly difficult for Apple to manufacture — it didn’t begin shipping until 10 months after the black models. That delay was surprising at the time, but seems downright bananas now. Can you imagine if, say, the midnight green iPhone 11 Pros still weren’t shipping now, and wound up not shipping until this coming July? ↩︎︎︎

  2. Long gone are the various regulatory indicia and small-print cruft like model numbers and “Designed by Apple in California / Assembled in China”. Apple moved most of that stuff to software in the Settings app starting with the iPhone 6S. But the first iPhone that didn’t have those regulatory marks on the back was the Verizon iPhone 4, one of my favorite iPhones of all time. What an odd beast that was. It debuted 7 months after the regular iPhone 4, and was an entirely different model because Verizon’s 3G network was CDMA, not GSM. It sported the 4S antenna lines over eight months before the iPhone 4S was unveiled. ↩︎︎︎

  3. These Portrait Mode effects all have a live preview in the Camera app, but the live previews are crude approximations. I wonder how many people don’t bother trying these effects because the previews look so rough. Once you snap a portrait using these effects, it takes a brief moment to be processed, and while the end result can still be hit-or-miss, it’s always way better than the live preview would suggest. ↩︎︎

  4. I must point out here that Touch ID works just fine while wearing a face mask, and Face ID doesn’t work at all. That’s been a consideration for medical professionals and citizens of countries with a culture of face-mask-wearing ever since Apple introduced Face ID with the iPhone X in 2017. Now it’s a consideration for literally billions of us around the world. That’s not enough to even vaguely make me, personally, consider switching to the SE as my personal phone. But your mileage may vary, especially if the nature of your work requires you to wear a face mask all day, not just while out of the house on brief excursions. (But such jobs might also require gloves.) ↩︎︎︎

  5. If you’re in that camp, I strongly advise buying an iPhone SE while the getting is good. I would wager, heavily, that this is the last iPhone Apple will ever make with a home button and the old-style user interface. ↩︎︎︎

The iPad Magic Keyboard

Monday, 20 April 2020

Greatly anticipating its arrival, I unboxed the iPad Pro Magic Keyboard as soon as it appeared at my door, and before I even attached my iPad Pro, I was put off. It felt too stiff to open. Then I did attach my iPad Pro (immediate thought: “Man, these magnets are strong”), closed and opened the iPad-as-laptop configuration a few times, and formed a crushingly disappointing first impression. I didn’t like it.

The hinge was way stiffer than I expected. I mean like “What the hell is going on here?” stiff, “Is there some sort of packaging attached that I neglected to remove?” stiff — which, needless to say, was not what I was expecting at all. And I knew the iPad-as-laptop was going to be top-heavy, but not this top-heavy. But where I say expecting I really mean hoping for. What I was hoping for was something approximating the feel and experience of a MacBook — a little more top heavy, a little stiffer at the hinge to accommodate that extra top-heaviness — but basically I wanted an iPad-as-laptop that feels like a MacBook Air.

It doesn’t feel like that at all. Not even close. Totally different. Going in with a set of expectations even loosely based on a hope like mine — for something that feels even vaguely MacBook-y — is like expecting a sip of piping hot coffee and it turns out your mug is filled with cold water. You instinctively reject it.

But water isn’t bad. Water, of course, is actually great.1 You just need to be expecting it.

Same with the iPad Magic Keyboard. Once I let go of my preconceptions, I fell in love. This took all of 15 minutes. I went from that “I don’t like the way this thing feels at all” first impression to “I can’t wait to start raving about how great this thing is” in 15 minutes. The iPad Magic Keyboard is to iPad-as-laptop accessories what AirPods were to earbuds: a game changer.

Physicality: Hinges and Magnets

Here’s why an iPad Magic Keyboard feels nothing like a MacBook: because it’s not actually magic. I mean that. It’s clever in several ways, but it cannot defy the laws of physics. An iPad Pro is so much heavier than a MacBook top case that of course the Magic Keyboard hinge system has to be not just a little stiffer than a MacBook hinge, but way stiffer. Your first impression, like mine, is likely to be off-base just because it’s so different. But once you start using it, just for a few minutes, you can feel why it has to be so different. It’s just an entirely different allocation of weight and center of gravity, by necessity.

You know how with a regular laptop, when you want to open it, you just set it down where you want it, closed, and you open the lid just by lifting it with one of your thumbs? Yeah, you cannot do that with this. Opening the iPad Magic Keyboard is a two-handed operation. Part of this is that the combination of the magnets and stiff primary hinge forms a strong seal. But mainly it’s because the iPad with Magic Keyboard is so top-heavy.

Illustrative Exercise: Turn a MacBook Air upside down and try opening it one-handed. Even if you give yourself a little bit of an opening to break the initial magnetic seal, you can’t really open an upside down MacBook one-handed because as you try to raise the heavy part (which is now on top), the bottom part rises with it, because the hinge is stiffer than the bottom (the display half) is heavy.2 But that’s the weight distribution of the iPad with Magic Keyboard right-side up. One-handed opening of a laptop is predicated on the base being not just heavier, but significantly heavier, than the top.

Apple’s iPad Smart Keyboards are top-heavy too, but you can open them one-handed because the Smart Keyboard hinges have no tension at all. The Smart Keyboard “hinges” are just floppy strips of silicone (or fluoroelastomer or whatever that rubbery material is), so you can set an iPad with Smart Keyboard on its spine, pry it apart with your thumb, and let the keyboard flop to the table surface. Gravity won’t help you like that with the Magic Keyboard because the hinge has so much resistance. Closed, the Magic Keyboard and Smart Keyboard look a lot like. But they don’t work alike mechanically at all — the Magic Keyboard main hinge has a lot of tension and the Smart Keyboard “hinge” has no tension at all. If you really do find yourself needing to open the iPad Magic Keyboard one-handed, it can be done with some contortions, but practically speaking it’s like opening a jar — there’s no way to do it one-handed that’s more convenient than two-handed.3

Another thing to understand about the iPad Magic Keyboard is that it has two hinges, which serve entirely different purposes. The main hinge is the metallic (aluminum, I presume) cylinder connecting the top and bottom panels. The secondary hinge is the crease in the top panel. The main hinge only has two positions: open and closed. When you open the iPad Magic Keyboard and the main hinge gets to its fully open position, it firmly snaps into place. At this point, with the iPad itself still flush against the entire top panel, the iPad is more closed than open — it’s not yet a usable viewing angle. You then need to exert a bit of additional force to magnetically separate the bottom of the iPad display from the bottom fold of the top panel — once separated, you’re now adjusting the secondary hinge, which is how you adjust the viewing angle. This secondary hinge has a bit more tension than a regular laptop, but not much. To tilt the viewing angle further back, you’ll want to keep a counterweight — your other hand, generally — on the palm rest area of the keyboard panel. Otherwise, instead of tilting the display back, the keyboard will lift off the table.

So yes, both hinges are quite stiff. But this is good. They need to be stiff because the iPad is — relative to a normal laptop top panel — quite heavy. The stiffness of these hinges means that when you adjust the viewing angle just so, to the exact angle you want, the entire unit stays in that position even as you detach and reattach the iPad. Snap the iPad off, snap it back on, and it will be at the exact same viewing angle. The primary hinge snaps into place and stays there; the secondary hinge is not something you merely fold open but rather something you bend into position. But because it has such tension you can bend it to the exact angle you want and it will stay there. It’s reminiscent of using a GorillaPod tripod. This is good.

With the Smart Keyboards, you can fold the keyboard all the way around to the back, like you would with a regular non-keyboard iPad cover. (The iPad is smart enough to ignore key presses when a Smart Keyboard is folded back like this.) The Magic Keyboard doesn’t even come close to this. Look at any of Apple’s marketing photos for the Magic Keyboard — they all show the main hinge at its fully-open position, which is a decidedly acute angle. That’s as far back as it goes. That’s not clear just from looking at it, but when you feel it, it makes sense immediately.

The Smart Keyboards are iPad covers you can type on. The Magic Keyboard is a portable keyboard stand, not a cover — when you want to use your iPad as a tablet, not a laptop, you must detach it.

Apple advertises the iPad Magic Keyboard as supporting viewing angles from 90 to 130 degrees. Using a simple protractor (hooray for having a high-schooler in the house), fully open, it appears to be exactly 130 degrees. It feels like it should open at least a little bit more, but that’s wishful thinking. At 130 degrees the iPad Magic Keyboard is not tippy at all; if it opened even a little further, it would be.

For comparison, a new MacBook Air opens to about 135 degrees, and an iPad with Smart Keyboard in the more open of its two positions opens only to 125 degrees. (The Smart Keyboard’s more upright slot = 110 degrees.) 5 degrees doesn’t sound like much, but in practice it is quite noticeable. At their widest viewing angles, the Magic Keyboard feels noticeably more open than the Smart Keyboard, and the MacBook Air feels noticeably more open than the Magic Keyboard.

It’s hard to convey just how strong the iPad Magic Keyboard‘s hinges and magnets are. I know there was a lot of skepticism when Apple’s promotional video introducing the new iPad Pros showed people using the Magic Keyboard on their laps, laying in bed, sitting on a park bench, etc. Wouldn’t that risk tipping over or detaching magnetically or flopping at a hinge? Nope. The hinges are so stiff and magnets so strong that you can pick it up by the keyboard palm rest and give the whole thing a vigorous shake and it not only will remain attached magnetically, the viewing angle will not change. You can turn the whole thing upside down, holding it by the keyboard, and it will not detach. It feels like it can’t possibly separate accidentally. You can use this as a literal laptop with utter confidence.

The Magic Keyboard’s magnets are much stronger than those of the Smart Keyboard — I would never try to hold an iPad in a Smart Keyboard upside down or give it a shake while open. The iPad Magic Keyboard and Smart Keyboard look quite similar and serve the same general purpose, but in practice they are as different as a surgical scalpel is from a butter knife.

Regarding compatibility with 2018 iPad Pros, there seems to be no difference at all. I’ve been testing a 12.9-inch Magic Keyboard with my 2020 iPad Pro review unit, but I also attached my wife’s 12.9-inch 2018 iPad Pro. Magnetically and functionally, I could detect no difference.

Apple erred on the side of making the hinges and magnets too strong, not too weak, and once you grok that it’s a folding stand, not a folding cover, it is obvious that this is the correct design.

Weight

Again, I’ve been using a 12.9-inch Magic Keyboard review unit. I’ve ordered an 11-inch model for my personal 2018 iPad Pro, but I don’t yet have one to test, so the weight for the 11-inch model below is speculative. But given how accurate Dr. Drang’s speculation was for the weight of the 12.9-inch model  — a mere 3 percent low, according to my scale — it’s safe to assume it’s close enough. Update 22 April 2020: My 11-inch Magic Keyboard arrived today, and it’s actually quite a bit heavier than Drang’s guesstimate (actual: 597g, guess: 483g). I’ve updated the table below accordingly.

Weight (kg) Δ vs. 13″ MBA
12″ MacBook (2017) 0.92 72%
11″ MacBook Air (2015) 1.08 84%
13″ MacBook Air (2020) 1.28 —
 
11″ iPad Pro (naked) 0.47 37%
11″ iPad Pro (w/ Smart Kbd) 0.77 60%
11″ iPad Pro (w/ Magic Kbd) 1.07 84%
 
13″ iPad Pro (naked) 0.64 50%
13″ iPad Pro (w/ Smart Kbd) 1.06 83%
13″ iPad Pro (w/ Magic Kbd) 1.35 105%

Comparing laptop to laptop, a 12.9-inch iPad with a Smart Cover is 15 percent lighter than a 13-inch MacBook Air. With a Magic Keyboard, it’s about 8 percent heavier. That seems like a win — if you choose to carry a 12.9-inch iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard instead of a MacBook Air as your 13-inch-ish laptop device, you don’t pay any practical price in weight for it being a convertible.

The real win, in terms of weight, is the 11-inch configuration. Now that the 12-inch MacBook is discontinued (joining the late great 11-inch Air in the retirement home for ultra-lightweight Mac notebooks), Apple doesn’t make a Mac laptop in this size/weight class.

Keyboard and Trackpad

The keyboard is excellent. The keys have an outstanding feel and sound. It’s not exactly the same as the MacBook Air keyboard — the key caps are more rounded at the corners, and there’s just a slightly different feel and sound to it. But they definitely feel similar enough to justify sharing the “Magic Keyboard” name. If anything, I like typing on the iPad Magic Keyboard more than typing on the 16-inch MacBook Pro or 13-inch MacBook Air — the keys either have slightly more travel or they just feel like they do to me — but all three are so fundamentally similar that the differences come down to nitpicking. Apple’s portable keyboard game is back.

Backlighting is excellent. You can adjust the brightness in Settings → General → Keyboard → Hardware Keyboard, but the default is perfect for my taste. There’s a wee bit of light leakage around the outside of the keys, but it’s so subtle and looks so nice that I suspect it might be deliberate, and if not deliberate, it’s a Bob Ross-esque happy little accident. In the dark, it just subtly outlines the shape of the keys.

As on Apple’s Smart Keyboards, the iPad Magic Keyboard has no Escape key. If you miss the Escape key, there are a couple workarounds. First, in most situations, ⌘-period works as a synonym for Escape. This is a standard Mac shortcut that dates back to classic Mac OS decades ago. (In my opinion, any context where ⌘-period doesn’t work as a synonym for the Escape key ought to be considered a bug.) The other option is to go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Hardware Keyboard, and remap one of the modifier keys to Escape. I suggest either Caps Lock or the Globe key. If you do remap Globe to Escape (which I did), you can still bring up the Emoji keyboard with the system-wide Control-Space shortcut — a good shortcut to remember if you use any third-party keyboard that doesn’t have a built-in Globe key.

I went back to the Smart Keyboard cover to type just this single paragraph. It’s like comparing a meal at your favorite restaurant to a meal on an airplane. iPad Smart Keyboards are dead to me.

There are no F-keys (nor, obviously, a Touch Bar). I think this is partly philosophical, in that Apple intends iPad keyboards for typing only, not for controlling stuff in the system like display brightness or audio volume. But also this is practical — there’s really no room for a row of F-keys. The iPad doesn’t really “float” the way Apple’s exquisite product photography or new ad campaign suggests.4 In practice you barely notice that the bottom of the iPad is suspended at all, and where it is suspended actually overhangs the top of the number key row when fully open to the 130 degree viewing angle. You could reach a hypothetical row of F-keys if they were there, but it’d be like reaching into a slot to get to them. Awkward.

While the keyboard is very comparable in size and feel to that of the MacBook Air, the trackpad is entirely different. The MacBook Air trackpad is about 120 x 80 mm. The 12.9-inch Magic Keyboard trackpad is just 100 x 50 mm — by area it’s just a hair over half the size. (The 16-inch MacBook Pro keyboard is the size of a small studio apartment in comparison — 160 x 100 mm — as tall as the iPad Magic Keyboard trackpad is wide and over 3× the area.)

This small trackpad takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s fine. I increased the speed of the pointer to the fastest setting,5 which helps.

One basic task that wasn’t obvious to me, and I’ll admit took me surprisingly long to figure out on my own, is how you show the Dock: you swipe down with one finger past the bottom of the screen. If I had read Apple’s instructions rather than stubbornly insisting upon figuring it out myself, I’d have saved a good five minutes.

Tracking precision and multi-finger gestures are excellent. Mac users will feel right at home.

A significant difference, though, is that the trackpad is not “magic” — it is a physically-clicking button, not an inert piece of glass with haptics to simulate clicks. It clicks for real. It feels great, and it’s equally clicky at the top and bottom, unlike older MacBook trackpads which had a diving-board-like mechanism that made them far clickier at the bottom than at the top. The only downside to this trackpad is that it’s pretty loud when it clicks — way louder than any MacBook trackpad or a standalone Magic Trackpad.

Miscellany

This is a great-looking keyboard. The key caps and trackpad are black; the surrounding area is near-black. I wish the dark MacBooks were this dark instead of “space gray”, which is just slightly darker than regular aluminum. If you’re going to go dark, go dark.

When you charge the iPad through the Smart Connector (by plugging your charging cable into the Magic Keyboard), it charges slowly: about 0.4 percent per minute, 25 percent per hour. If you want to charge your iPad quickly, plug the cable into the iPad. Charging via the Smart Connector is the iPad equivalent of using an inductive Qi charger with an iPhone — convenient but slow. [Update: Take this whole paragraph with a large grain of salt for the moment — my charging-over-Smart-Connector-is-slow numbers don’t match what others have been reporting, so I’m retesting. Stand by for updated numbers, but the good news is I think charging via the Smart Connector isn’t slow.]

The Bottom Line

At $350 for the 12.9-inch model and $300 for the 11-inch, the iPad Magic Keyboard is not cheap, but it feels like a premium product. I think it unlikely we’ll find a peripheral with comparable quality at a lower price.

As per my usual habit when reviewing iPads and iPad peripherals, I wrote this entire review using the Magic Keyboard. In the past, this has felt like a chore. The lack of trackpad support for precision editing felt like trying to write with a pen while wearing mittens. Now it’s an outright pleasure — a combination I might choose for long-form writing simply because it’s great.

As a physical contraption the iPad Magic Keyboard is utterly brilliant. As a practical device for work, it feels seamlessly natural. The combination of excellent hardware — truly exquisite, from the hinges and magnets to the keyboard and trackpad themselves — and outstanding pointer and gesture support in iPadOS 13.4 make it hard to believe we haven’t been able to convert an iPad into a great laptop for years. This is an altogether new experience with an iPad, but it’s so natural it feels longstanding. 

  1. As longtime DF followers well know, this is even more true if the water is preposterously, bordering on dangerously, over-carbonated. Unless of course you’re using the water to fussily brew coffee. ↩︎︎

  2. When you consider it, it has to be this way — a MacBook hinge must be stronger than the display is heavy, otherwise the display wouldn’t stay in position when open. It would droop. ↩︎︎︎

  3. You can, of course, close the Magic Keyboard one-handed, no problem, because you’re exerting force against the resistance of the desk / table / lap it’s sitting upon. ↩︎︎︎

  4. Apple’s new commercial, promoting the iPad Magic Keyboard specifically, is particularly problematic in this regard. The ad is titled “Float”, and shows a hummingbird hovering around an iPad Magic Keyboard tilting to and fro, seemingly ever so effortlessly. As I expound upon at great length in this very review, it’s not at all effortless to tilt the display backward — an entire swarm of hummingbirds couldn’t do it — and this ad is going to set the wrong expectation for how it feels and works. ↩︎︎︎

  5. You have to love the explicit homage to Susan Kare’s brilliant 1984 Macintosh Control Panel design with the tortoise and hare icons on the iPad’s new tracking speed slider. The new iPad slider flips the direction of the hare, which at first I objected to on general principle. Kare’s original 1984 Control Panel is quite arguably the single best graphical user interface ever designed. It had no text labels (!), which made it both literally and figuratively iconic. But upon reflection flipping the hare actually makes more sense: it puts slow to fast in one direction. A subtle improvement to a 36-year-old masterpiece of UI design. ↩︎︎︎