By John Gruber
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Robert Heaton:
Last week I set up my tablet on my new laptop. As part of installing its drivers I was asked to accept Wacom’s privacy policy.
Being a mostly-normal person I never usually read privacy policies. Instead I vigorously hammer the “yes” button in an effort to reach the game, machine, or medical advice on the other side of the agreement as fast as possible. But Wacom’s request made me pause. Why does a device that is essentially a mouse need a privacy policy? I wondered. Sensing skullduggery, I decided to make an exception to my anti-privacy-policy-policy and give this one a read.
Absolutely appalling what Wacom tracks.
Last week Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2019. This year 65 voters (hand-selected by Snell) graded Apple in 12 areas. I was one of them, and, like last year, thought it only fair to publish my grades and remarks here at Daring Fireball. Comments in [brackets] are additional commentary I wrote now, and were not included in what I submitted to Snell.
This was a hard score for me to assign.
My first thoughts went to hardware. We’ve got an amazing new Mac Pro that rekindles the era of workstations that offer the best performance money can buy. The best CPUs, the best SSDs, the best RAM (up to 1.5 TB!). And it’s a tremendous design accomplishment — there aren’t even any cables inside the machine. We also have a new 16-inch MacBook Pro that I think is the best notebook Apple has made in 5-6 years. It fixes everything wrong with the 15-inch MacBook Pros that preceded it — especially the keyboard.
Everything isn’t perfect on the hardware front. The iMac Pro is now two years old. It’s a great machine but it hasn’t been touched in two years. That’s not pro. You can say it’s Intel’s fault because the iMac Pro is based on a line of Xeon CPUs that haven’t been updated in two years, but it’s Apple’s name on the box. The buck stops with Apple. And while the 16-inch MacBook Pro now has a totally new, totally great keyboard, it’s the most expensive model in the lineup and none of the other MacBooks have that keyboard. Yet, we all presume, but the fact is, if you buy a MacBook Air today — the best-selling, most-popular MacBook — you are not getting a good keyboard. So all things considered, I’d say a B for Mac hardware.
Then I think about software. And that means thinking about MacOS 10.15 Catalina. And those thoughts are not good. Off the top of my head I’m hard pressed to think of anything in Catalina that’s an improvement over 10.14 Mojave, and I can think of a lot of things that are worse. I get it that security and convenience are at odds, and it’s a difficult job for Apple to find the balanced sweet spot between the two. But Catalina clearly bends too far in the direction of security. By design, it’s just too inconvenient, with apps generating system-level alerts prompting for permission for things as rudimentary as being able to see the files on my desktop — sometimes when those apps are in the background, and I know that at the moment the alert appears those apps are not trying to read files on my desktop. But why in the world is the desktop treated as some sort of sensitive location?
Back in 2007 Apple ran a “Get a Mac” commercial mocking Windows Vista for this exact same sort of overzealous permission nagging. That’s exactly what Catalina feels like.
If Apple has somehow determined that typical users need these sort of permission alerts, fine, but there should be a single switch for expert users to toggle to effectively say “I trust all of the software on my Mac”. Call it “Pro Mode”, call it “Developer Mode”, call it “Expert Mode”, whatever. But I don’t know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed security design of Catalina. Not one. Every single expert user I know is annoyed. That is a bad place for MacOS to be. MacOS 10.16 needs a serious course correction to fix this, and if 10.16 goes the opposite way — growing even more heavy-handed in restricting professional Mac users from just using their machines as they want and expect to — I genuinely fear for the future of the Mac as a platform for serious computer users. Which is crazy considering that Apple just unveiled Mac Pro workstation hardware that can cost upwards of $50,000.
And there are bugs in Catalina. Lots and lots of bugs. About one out of ten times that I open my new 16-inch MacBook Pro, the display contrast is horribly wrong. [Not sure if I’m on a lucky streak or if this actually got fixed, but I haven’t seen this issue in over a week.] I can “fix” it by either turning the display brightness way down and then back up, or by closing the lid and reopening it. But I’ve been using Mac laptops for 20 years and I’ve never once had an issue like that. Another paper-cut bug: turn off toolbars in Finder windows and a few minutes later, the toolbars will reappear. There are always bugs in new OS releases, and we always complain that the state of Apple’s software is too buggy. But no one can convince me that Catalina is not abnormally buggy, even now, months after release.
And then there’s Catalyst. Don’t get me started.
If I could give Mac hardware and software separate scores, I’d give hardware a B and software an F — not one thing about Mac software got better in 2019 and everything that did change made it worse. Where’s the Tylenol?
2019 was a stellar year for iPhone hardware. I love all the iPhone 11 models. I’ve been an avid hobbyist photographer for 20 years and I happily shoot over 95 percent of my photos using my iPhone. Everything about the iPhone 11 cameras is great, from the hardware to the Camera app software. I love the new ultra-wide angle lens in all of the 11 models, and I think Apple made the right call using the ultra-wide as the only additional lens on the regular iPhone 11 (as opposed to the telephoto). My one and only significant gripe is that there’s only one size for the non-Pro iPhone 11. There ought to be a smaller one.
iOS 13 is a very good release. Shortcuts are proving to be the most exciting power-user feature in the history of iOS as a platform. Sharing sheets are better than ever too. I think the overall look is getting a bit dated, though. A fair amount of Z-axis depth has been restored since the visual reboot in iOS 7, but it still feels obsessively “flat”. And parts of Apple’s iOS software feel designed only to look good, as opposed to actually be good from an interactive standpoint.
[I think my Mac remarks made me grumpy — I wrote them before anything else for my report card. If I were grading the iPhone in 2019 today, I’d bump it up to an A.]
iPad hardware is wonderful. It seems like iPad Pro hardware is on a roughly 18-month refresh schedule, so there was nothing new in Pro hardware in 2019, but the current models are so good in every regard that that’s just fine. And the consumer models offer the best bang-for-the-buck of any computers Apple has ever sold, period. Just like with the Mac, I’d give iPad hardware an excellent score on its own, an A.
But to say that I’m not a fan of iPadOS is an understatement. I wish there were a switch to force iPadOS to back to the pre “multitasking” days when the iPad interaction model was “just a big iPhone” — where every app was full screen and there was no drag-and-drop. I only ever accidentally drag things like links, and I find iPadOS’s concept of “windows” to be baffling. [Turns out there sort of is such a mode in Settings → Home Screen & Dock → Multitasking.] Getting the split-screen and Slide Over stuff to work is utterly unintuitive. It’s not the sort of thing you can figure out on your own just by using it, which is how the Mac user interface works. You have to know in advance how iPadOS split-screen stuff works. Just consider the fundamentals: if you want to launch an app you just tap it on the home screen or in the Dock. So far so good. But if you want a second app next to the first one, you have to drag the icon for that app out of the Dock? Why in the world would dragging an app icon launch an instance of an app? Forget about the Mac — what other platform in the world works like that? Put instances of Safari in two different “windows” — say, one split-screened with Notes and another in a “window” of its own. Then, using a hardware keyboard, Command-Tab to Safari. Which one comes forward? Toss a coin. It’s madness. I’m glad Apple started branding iOS and iPadOS separately. One of them is very cohesive, the other is incoherent. The iPadOS multitasking emperor has no clothes. I wish I could run iOS on my iPad Pro.
Steady as she goes. I love my titanium Series 5.
[I think Apple could do a much better job with watch face design. I’m not talking about allowing third-party watch faces, which, if I were in charge of Apple Watch, I wouldn’t allow either. I’m talking about Apple’s own watch faces, the only ones we can choose from.]
Regular AirPods remain great and AirPods Pro are my favorite headphones ever.
No new hardware and the new Apple TV app is confusing. I’d be fine with a hardware update that did nothing but include an altogether new remote control — but a price drop would be good too. The overwhelming majority of my non-sports TV watching is done via Apple TV, and that damn remote is a daily nuisance.
This was the year of Services for Apple — they even had a dedicated Services event. I think they mostly nailed it. The original TV series I was interested in were all good to great (The Morning Show, For All Mankind, Servant), and I think the “start with a whole year for free with the purchase of any iPhone, iPad, or Mac” promotion is just what the doctor ordered for a new service with a very limited library of content.
I’m still wary of Apple entering the credit card business, period, but I use my Apple Card for all Apple Pay purchases (to get the 3 percent cash back). Daily cash back is a great feature, and Apple’s 4 percent cash back promotion for Apple Store purchases during the holiday gift season was undeniably a great deal.
I’ll keep beating the drum that iCloud storage tiers are too small, though — especially the 5 GB free tier.
I’ll give this whole a category a “meh”. We use it at home, mostly to control smart window shades and lights, but I think for most people, if you haven’t even really looked into it yet, I’d say you’re not missing much. I feel like Apple still hasn’t gotten close to making HomeKit truly compelling.
This sort of thing is highly subjective, but everything new I’ve used this year has been rock solid.
The saving grace is iOS, by which I mean iPhone’s iOS. See my comments on Mac and iPad and Apple TV above. I’d go with a B for iOS and D for the others.
From what I’ve seen from developer friends, App Store review times are truly excellent now — a complete change from before the reorganization that put App Store review under Phil Schiller. But when an App Store review does hit a snag, it can go completely dark (from the developer’s perspective) for a week or longer. There’s still much room for improvement here. And I continue to believe Apple should lighten up on allowing apps to at least link to websites where content purchases can be made.
It’s good for the entire world that Apple is a staunch supporter of LGBT and racial equality, serious environmentalism, privacy as a human right, and true user-controlled encryption as an aspect of privacy.
It’s an absolute disgrace that Apple allowed Donald Trump to use the Mac Pro assembly plant in Austin as the backdrop for an event to promote his re-election. I called it “a low moment in Apple’s proud history, and a sadly iconic moment for Tim Cook” when it happened, and feel just as strongly two months later. Trump is a liar, a crook, and his administration has proven to be a menace to everything Apple stands for: LGBT and racial equality, the environment, and privacy as a human right. ★
Peter Kafka, reporting for Recode:
Spotify is making yet another big-budget purchase aimed at getting a lead in the growing podcast industry: The streaming music company has agreed to a deal to purchase The Ringer, the podcast-centric media company run and owned by Bill Simmons.
Spotify intends to hire Simmons and all of his approximately 90 employees. Most of those employees work on The Ringer’s website, which covers sports and culture, and Spotify intends to keep the site up and running.
But what Spotify really wants out of the deal is Simmons’s ability to create podcasts, including his Bill Simmons Podcast, and some 30 other titles, which range from an NBA chat show to one devoted to rewatching old movies.
I remain deeply wary of Spotify’s intentions in the podcast space, but if they keep The Ringer’s podcasts as open podcasts, this acquisition really shouldn’t matter much to listeners.
Apple Developer news:
Starting in March 2020, you’ll be able to distribute iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS versions of your app as a universal purchase, allowing customers to enjoy your app and in‑app purchases across platforms by purchasing only once. You can choose to create a new app for these platforms using a single app record in App Store Connect or add platforms to your existing app record. Get started by building and testing your apps using a single bundle ID with Xcode 11.4 beta.
It’s great to have the option for universal purchases, but tying it to the bundle identifier seems problematic. What if you’ve already shipped an app for multiple platforms? Apple doesn’t let you change the bundle identifier. Do you have to abandon the old app (losing its links and ratings and migrating its files and AppleScripts) or maintain two separate apps?
From the business side, it’s a great user experience for customers who want to pay once and get everything. But what about customers who only want the iPhone version and may not even own a Mac or Apple TV? They have to pay the same price? And, for developers, this is likely to further devalue software. Get all the versions for one low price, with Apple implying that it didn’t take much extra effort.
Liz Plank, writing for NBC News:
Of course the speaker is getting pushback. Pelosi displaying the tiniest bit of rage exemplifies the scrutiny that awaits her and women in politics — a scrutiny that is even worse for women of color. Women learn early on to mask anger because they know they’ll be punished for it. While Trump gets to have a meltdown almost every day, female politicians have to be much more savvy and calculated when communicating even the slightest bit of emotion.
But as I watched the twittersphere debate whether Pelosi’s small act of civil disobedience was out of line or not, all I could think about were the Democratic voters I got to interview in Iowa this week leading up to the Iowa caucus. And how desperate they are to win this November. The stakes in the 2020 elections are higher than ever and the voters feel it. Every single caucusgoer I spoke to said the same thing: “We need someone who can beat Trump.”
So will the Democrats continue to play nice? Will they smile through their frustration as the president hurls insults and disgraces the office he is privileged to sit in every day? Or do they want to win?
Pelosi — and I choose this word deliberately — triggers Republicans because she’s (a) a woman, and (b) plays hardball. She’s not fucking around. She was cool as ice as she tore that speech — it was like she was ripping up a junk mail credit card offer. It’s Republicans who’ve flipped out emotionally.
For decades now Republicans have been playing win-at-any-cost hardball politics, while Democrats have played nice. Trump’s presidency has laid bare what should have been obvious to Democrats long ago — they must play hardball too. The difference has been hardball vs. playing-nice-ball. It needs to be win-at-any-cost-including-subverting-democracy hardball (Republicans) vs. hardball with integrity (Democrats).
Pelosi gets that. And it drives Republicans nuts. The Democrats have played nice for so long that Republicans are outraged when a Democrat simply gives them a taste of their own hardball medicine.
Stuart McGurk, interviewing Eddy Cue for GQ last summer:
And yet the rumours that have so far come out regarding Apple’s TV shows are that they’re purposefully taking streaming back to the network TV age: fun for all the family. The New York Post reported that Cook and Cue were visiting sets in order to rein in shows that weren’t toeing the line. […]
Cook’s most common note on scripts, according to the report, was “Don’t be so mean.”
“I saw the comments that myself and Tim were writing notes on the scripts and whatever,” says Cue. “There’s never been one note passed from us on scripts, that I can assure you. We leave the folks [alone] who know they’re doing.”
So Cook didn’t give that particular note?
“I can assure you that was 100 percent false. He didn’t say, ‘Don’t be so mean.’ He didn’t say anything about a script.”
The NY Post report in question has never been walked back either. Say what you want about Apple’s original content thus far, but it does not lack for meanness.
Tripp Mickle and Joe Flint, writing back in September 2018 for The Wall Street Journal, “No Sex Please, We’re Apple: iPhone Giant Seeks TV Success on Its Own Terms”:
Apple’s entertainment team must walk a line few in Hollywood would consider. Since Mr. Cook spiked “Vital Signs,” Apple has made clear, say producers and agents, that it wants high-quality shows with stars and broad appeal, but it doesn’t want gratuitous sex, profanity or violence.
The result is an approach out of step with the triumphs of the video-streaming era. Other platforms, such as HBO and Amazon.com Inc., have made their mark in original content with edgier programming that often wins critical acclaim. Netflix Inc., which helped birth the streaming revolution, built its original-content business on “House of Cards,” a drama about an ethically bankrupt politician, and “Orange Is the New Black,” a comedic drama about a women’s prison. Both feature rough language and plenty of sex.
I suppose you can argue about the word “gratuitous”, but the TV+ shows I’ve watched — The Morning Show, For All Mankind, and Servant — don’t seem to hold back on sex or strong language. The Morning Show and Servant in particular are clearly adult shows. I haven’t watched See, but from what I’ve heard, it too is for adults. As far as I’m aware, The Wall Street Journal never walked this back.
The story behind the very best high-fidelity podcast audio processing engine ever made.
The story behind the second-best high-fidelity podcast audio processing engine ever made.
What problems does this solve? Who has a pocket that isn’t deep enough for an unfolded phone but is thick enough for this thing folded up? This is pure gimmickry.
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
Apple is currently running a new Apple Watch promotion that’s ideal for anyone who is considering trading in an older Apple Watch model to purchase a new model. Apple is offering up to $100 on the Apple Watch Series 2 and Apple Watch Series 3 models, which is a higher trade-in amount than Apple normally offers for those devices.
No word on what you can get for a Series 0 in 18-karat solid gold.
Federico Viticci, writing for MacStories:
I’ll cut right to the chase: I’ve been using the new Fantastical for the past few months (hence the inclusion in my Must-Have Apps story), and it’s become the only calendar app I need, offering more power and flexibility than any alternative from Apple or the App Store. The free version of the new Fantastical — effectively, Fantastical 2 with a fresh coat of paint and some smaller bonuses — is a capable alternative to Apple’s Calendar app, but the Premium version is where Flexibits’ latest creation truly shines. At $40/year, Fantastical Premium may be a big ask for some users, but as a busy individual who deals with teammates all over the globe and likes Fantastical’s new features, I plan to subscribe.
Among my favorite new features: complete feature-parity between platforms (previously, the Mac could do more than the iOS versions); integrated weather from a great source, AccuWeather (which is, needless to say, not a free service for Flexibits to offer); calendar sets with iCloud syncing; “interesting calendars” from SchedJoules like team schedules for your favorite sports (also not a free service for Flexibits); and full task support integrating with Apple Reminders, Todoist, and Google Tasks.
The interface of the apps, as usual from Flexibits, is exquisite. Take note, in particular, of the top-left-corner menu button in the iPhone app. It animates joyfully when opening, has subtle haptic feedback, and you can just tap-and-drag to select an item from it.
Speaking of the App Store and the market for pro utility software, here, once again, is Dieter Bohn:
It’s not every day we get to talk about a good old-fashioned utility app update. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re a dying breed, but the Apple App Store platform dynamics of recent years have made their row much harder to hoe.
Which is one reason I’m happy to say that if you’re a Mac or iPhone user (or, ideally, both), you should absolutely go check out the newly updated Fantastical apps. There are a few new features and parity across platforms — I personally am excited for a calendar app that integrates with several to-do apps.
The thing about this update that may grab some attention is that it is moving to a subscription model. Historically, this kind of move has sparked consternation, but I’m not feeling any of that. It’s $4.99 a month or — in my preferred way to talk about subscription pricing — $40 per year (a $20 discount). That subscription gets you access to the iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch apps. Non-Apple users should look elsewhere.
I think the subscription model is totally fair, especially given Flexibits’ history of updates and quality. That’s partially because, as I alluded to up top, there really aren’t better options for this category of apps given the rules laid down by Apple in the App Store.
Consternation indeed. Lots of complaining on Twitter, and Fantastical 3’s App Store reviews have been dragged down by angry users complaining about the pricing change. For users who only used Fantastical on iPhone, I can see the complaint about pricing — it went from a one-time purchase of $4-5 to a $40 annual subscription. That’s a big jump. But — and this is a huge “but” — Flexibits (Fantastical’s developer) went out of its way to let anyone who owned Fantastical 2 keep the features they already had access to when upgrading to Fantastical 3. If you owned Fantastical 2 you can use Fantastical 3 free of charge and keep the features you already had.
And if, like me, you used Fantastical across iPhone, iPad, and Mac (they previously sold the iPad app as a separate version from iPhone), $40 a year is quite reasonable. Fantastical is a professional calendaring (and now task management) app, and as Bohn points out, subscriptions are the best way for a developer like Flexibits to succeed in the App Store.
Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge:
We’ll have analysis of YouTube’s numbers up on the site today, so instead I’ll just pay a little more attention to the Android bit: a total of $80 billion paid out to Android developers, which is significantly less than the $155 billion Apple has paid out via the iOS App Store.
Even if you account for Google allowing developers to use their own payment methods and made a bunch of other caveats, I suspect you can’t avoid the truth. The vast majority of phones on Earth run Android, and yet it is almost surely the case that there’s more money for developers in iPhone apps. That’s always been the conventional wisdom, but Google’s own numbers all but confirm it.
I’d say $80 billion compared to Apple’s $155 billion is a very respectable number, all things considered. In the early days of the mobile revolution, the big debate was whether the Android-iOS competition would play out like Windows-Mac did in the ’90s. I, for one, was correct that it would not.
But I think we were all wrong — myself included — about the biggest trend of all. The question wasn’t about whether there was more money to be made developing for iOS than Android — it was about whether there was money to be made developing for mobile, period. Obviously, $235 billion in combined payments from Apple and Google is a lot of money. But how much of that is for games? Productivity and utility software has turned out to be a hard sell to mobile users. The default is “free”.
Stephen Warwick, writing for iMore:
According to Investor’s Business Daily:
Less than 10% of Apple customers eligible for 12-month free trials of the company’s Apple TV+ streaming video service have taken the offer, a Wall Street analyst said Monday. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimates that under 10 million Apple customers have accepted the free trial offer. He calls that a “surprisingly low take rate.”
The report is in stark contrast to a recent WSJ report, which included estimates that Apple TV+ may have north of 30 million subscribers. As is per usual with these sorts of estimates, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
Either that, or everyone is wrong.
It is a great deal — why not watch the shows you’re interested in free-of-charge? And Apple does make it easy to unsubscribe — it’s the opposite of, say, trying to cancel your cable subscription. And Apple has done an excellent job of making it really easy for eligible customers — those who’ve recently bought a qualifying device — to get their year-long free subscription started with a big button in the TV app on every device they make. If you buy a new Mac you can start your subscription from iPhone or Apple TV or iPad.
But I wonder how many people who qualify know all of this. How many people don’t know because they never even open the TV app? How many people who see the offer in the TV app don’t try it because they don’t trust that it’s really free for an entire year, and is very easy to cancel before getting charged in 12 months? How many people know that it works perfectly with family sharing — so even if they’re not personally interested in any of TV+’s shows, if any of their family members are, it’s worth signing up?
Nick Statt, reporting for The Verge:
YouTube generated nearly $5 billion in ad revenue in the last three months, Google revealed today as part of parent company Alphabet’s fourth quarter earnings report. This is the first report under newly instated Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who took over as the chief executive of the entire company late last year after co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back from day-to-day duties.
The announcement marks the first time in YouTube’s nearly 15 years as a Google-owned platform, since Google bought the website in 2006 for $1.65 billion, that the company has revealed how much money YouTube-hosted ads contribute to the search giant’s bottom line. On an annual basis, that makes YouTube a $15 billion-a-year business that contributes roughly 10 percent to all Google revenue. It also makes YouTube’s annual earnings nearly one fifth the size of all of Facebook’s.
Why release this now? Speculation centers around the fact that Alphabet’s revenue was $800M less than expected, even though profits beat expectations. Perhaps Alphabet is now breaking out revenue by product to emphasize that they’re not solely dependent on search.
Update: Jeremy Owens, writing for MarketWatch:
Revenue-recognition rules that were approved in 2014 and went into effect at the end of 2017 call on companies to report financial results to their investors in the same manner that they are reported to the main decision-maker at the company, typically the chief executive. Basically, if a CEO sees numbers for a large segment of the company, the company should be reporting that segment’s results to investors.
As the revenue-recognition rules were being put in place by companies in 2017 ahead of the deadline, the Securities and Exchange Commission entered into communication with Alphabet specifically to discern why it was not providing revenue numbers for its segments, mentioning YouTube, Google Cloud and some other businesses, such as hardware. Google responded by saying that its chief decision-maker, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, did not see results parsed to that level, though Google CEO Sundar Pichai did.
Deeply insightful thread from Louie Mantia:
People think iOS 7 killed superfluous things like wood textures, but more seriously it downplayed visual design. We lost things like shadows and lighting. This stuff isn’t just a veneer. They are tools. They were used to indicate so many things like inactivity or focus.
In 2020, iPadOS doesn’t convey app focus in split-screen mode. But window focus was apparent over 35 years ago on the original Macintosh. It was only black and white! But today when we have millions of colors, we don’t indicate focus well.
So perfectly said. Post-iOS 7, Apple has been obsessed with not indicating focus. A clear indication of input focus is so helpful to everyone from novices to experts.
The lack of focus indication is much more of a problem on iOS (iPhone and iPad, but especially iPad simply because the displays are so much bigger) than MacOS. But even Apple’s Mac apps often hide focus — I wish the text input field in Messages had a focus ring (like Safari’s location field does — or Message’s own search field), for example.
Interesting prank / proof of concept by Simon Weckert — he toted 99 second-hand phones around in a wagon, and thereby tricked Google Maps into thinking it was a severe traffic jam. Pretty sure the same thing would fool Apple Maps.
Google, in a statement to 9to5Google, responded with good humor:
Traffic data in Google Maps is refreshed continuously thanks to information from a variety of sources, including aggregated anonymized data from people who have location services turned on and contributions from the Google Maps community. We’ve launched the ability to distinguish between cars and motorcycles in several countries including India, Indonesia and Egypt, though we haven’t quite cracked traveling by wagon. We appreciate seeing creative uses of Google Maps like this as it helps us make maps work better over time.
DF sponsorships for February and March are mostly open, including this current week. One sponsor per week, with a sponsor-written entry in the RSS feed to start the week, a thank-you post right on the homepage from me at the end, and the one and only graphic ad on every page of the site all week long. No tracking or other privacy-invasive bullshit. Just plain honest ads. My best argument that they work: the number of repeat companies in the sponsor archive list.
So if you’ve got a product or service you’d like to promote to DF’s discerning audience, I’d love to have you as a sponsor.
Jason Snell:
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple.
This is the fifth year that I’ve presented this survey to a hand-selected group. They were prompted with 12 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 and optionally provide text commentary per category. I received 65 replies, with the average results as shown below.
Compiling these report cards is a mountain of work, and I am deeply thankful to Snell for doing it each year. The cumulative grades feel just about spot-on to me. As I did last year, I’ll publish my own full report card later today.
Speaking of Craig Mod, I somehow never linked to his November 2018 essay on the iPad as a pro computing device. There are a few aspects that were addressed in iPadOS 13, but most of it could just as easily have been published today:
I have a near endless bag of these nits to share. For the last year I’ve kept a text file of all the walls I’ve run into using an iPad Pro as a pro machine. Is this all too pedantic? Maybe. But it’s also kind of fun. When’s the last time we’ve been able to watch a company really figure out a new OS in public?
When I run into the above usability issues, it makes me wonder two things:
Why am I trying to do something this way? (What strange habit or unnecessary expectation am I bringing to the table?)
How would the simplicity of iOS be subverted by allowing this new thing to happen?
Computers are nothing if not a constellation of design and engineering details that either work for or against you. They either push you forward, smoothly, an encouraging tailwind allowing you to get done the work you want to get done, or they push back, become abrasive, breaking you from flow states, causing you to have to Google even the simplest task. I lost an hour the other day trying to open an Open Office Document. This is bananas. iPads should be better. They’re so close. And they’re certainly powerful enough.
Craig Mod:
In the end, launching a paid membership program is maybe the smartest thing I’ve done: 2019 was the most productive and creatively engaged year of my life. And I owe the brunt of that to the Explorers Club. A rapturous THANK YOU to everyone who joined. It has not been “easy,” or effortless. […]
Everyone’s needs are different. I can’t explicitly recommend every writer or photographer or YouTuber to start their own membership program. What I can do is tell you about my experience, and hope that it’s instructive to those readers out there who might, too, be membership-curious.
Memberships — often driven by members-only email newsletters — have been the lifeboat for indie publishing and creative arts in a market where ad spending has largely been guzzled up by Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The term “win-win” applies: income for creators; great writing/photography/videos/music for consumers, from their favorite creators.
I am tremendously grateful to everyone who has joined. I realize not everyone can afford to join, and I realize we’re all a bit bombarded by “memberships” and “subscriptions” these days. But ultimately — this is a good thing! A scant ten years ago this ecosystem barely existed. Now it’s ever-more normalized. This feels healthy. Directly supporting writers, artists, musicians, software developers, et cetera, feels like the final remaining puzzle piece of the last 30 years of independent creation. Computers democratized design in the ’80s/’90s, the web democratized publishing in the ’00s, and now proper payments infrastructure is democratizing creative sustainability.
Bingo. Mod’s Explorer’s Club is just sublime, by the way. Highly recommended.
Josh Nadeau, writing for Fast Company:
In November 2019, Russian parliament passed what’s become known as the “law against Apple.” The legislation will require all smartphone devices to preload a host of applications that may provide the Russian government with a glut of information about its citizens, including their location, finances, and private communications.
Apple typically forbids the preloading of third-party apps onto its system’s hardware. But come July 2020, when the law goes into effect, Apple will be forced to quit the country and a market estimated at $3 billion unless it complies. […]
“Typically” is a vast understatement. To my knowledge, Apple has never included third-party apps on iOS devices anywhere in the world. In the early years of iPhone, that would have been apps from phone carriers and their “partners”. It’s still typical today for an Android phone purchased from, say, Verizon, to include Verizon apps pre-installed.
Having such apps mandated by the government is new, but the principle remains the same: I expect Apple to resist this, and if necessary, pull the iPhone from the Russian market. (I would expect a very healthy gray market to develop in Russia if that happens.) If Apple concedes to such demands in one country, where does it stop?
Now that I think about it, I’m kind of surprised China hasn’t passed a law like this. That would put enormous financial pressure on Apple — the Russian iPhone market is $3 billion, yes, but that’s small potatoes for Apple. “Greater China” accounted for $13.5 billion in revenue for Apple last quarter alone.
When the “law against Apple” was passed in Russia back in November, experts expressed concern that the preloaded apps would pose just as real a threat as an official backdoor. Last week, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service published a list of which applications will be required: Among the programs are government-produced apps for paying taxes and fines, as well as banking, navigation, and social media platforms with links to official bodies. These would have the potential to collect and send data related to finances, location, communications, and more, all without direct user permission.
I think Apple ought to refuse to comply with such a law from any country, but holy hell Russia in particular would be a privacy and security nightmare. (Again, though, China would be worse.)
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring last week at DF. Kolide is a cybersecurity company that wants to educate your users about security best practices, giving them the tools to stay productive, while keeping their devices safe. Kolide created a Slack app that messages your employees when their Mac, Windows, or Linux device is out of compliance, along with clear instructions about what is wrong, step-by-step instructions to fix the issue themselves, and real-time updates when they resolved the problem.
Unlike most endpoint security solutions, Kolide was designed with user privacy in mind. Your users will know what data is collected about their device, who can see that data, and can even view the full source code of the agent that is run on the device.
Kolide is already used by hundreds of fast-growing companies who want to level-up their device security without locking down their devices. With easy automatic onboarding and user-to-device association, you can get up and running in minutes. Try Kolide’s new product for free for 30 days for your entire fleet.
Special guest Ben Thompson returns to the show to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the iPad, and pay tribute to Kobe Bryant and Clayton Christensen.
Sponsored by:
Copiously detailed, as ever. What a wonderful resource O’Beirne’s site is.
I like the idea that, once you have an app docked on one side of the screen, the other side of the screen would just show a shrunk-down home screen for launching a second app in that space. That way you’d launch a second (or third — let’s get nuts) app the same way you do the first.
I also like the idea of using color to indicate which app has focus. It’s absolutely bonkers that iPadOS has never indicated in any way which app in split-screen mode has focus — a clear sign that iPadOS’s multitasking interface was designed to look good, not to be functional. And by “look good” I mean “look good in the eyes of someone obsessed with visual minimalism”.
Ritchie suggests three-finger pinching for getting in and out of the mode where you set up split-screen arrangements. I think there should be buttons for it — a simple obvious affordance you can just tap with one finger. That’s my overriding desire for iPadOS: let us do much more just by tapping with a single finger.
Sam Byford, The Verge:
Nintendo had its strongest Switch quarter ever this holiday season, moving 10.81 million units to reach a total of 52.48 million sold as of the end of 2019. That means it’s now overtaken the Super Nintendo Entertainment System to become Nintendo’s third best-selling home console of all time behind the Wii and the NES.
Also worth pointing out that according to our estimates the Nintendo Switch passed the Xbox One in hardware shipments during the holiday quarter last year.
The Xbox One is not too far behind, but it has only taken Switch 34 months to achieve what the Xbox One did in 74 months.
The Switch is a triumph. It’s a great TV console and a great portable system. So great to see Nintendo with another hit platform.
Update: I was just chatting with a friend about the Switch and I said that I wish tvOS were a lot more like the Switch, and he responded, “YES”. But the Switch is also a great touchscreen interface. Nintendo really did square the circle: they created a single interface that works great both as a touchscreen UI and an up-down-left-right remote-in-your-hand TV UI. The Switch is a hit because the games are great, but the OS is also a triumph, and contributes to the joyfulness of using it.
Matthew Butterick:
Ligatures in programming fonts are a terrible idea.
And not because I’m a purist or a grump. (Some days, but not today.) Programming code has special semantic considerations. Ligatures in programming fonts are likely to either misrepresent the meaning of the code, or cause miscues among readers. So in the end, even if they’re cute, the risk of error isn’t worth it.
After kicking the tires with JetBrains Mono a few days ago (and taking a peek at Fira Code, another coding font with ligatures), I quickly came to the same conclusion as Butterick. It’s a bad idea that works contrary to the idea of how ligatures are supposed to work in typography.
If you’d rather see ≠ than != in your source code, your programming language should support the actual UTF-8 [NOT EQUAL TO] glyph in its grammar. As Butterick writes:
So in a source file that uses Unicode characters, how would you know if you’re looking at a
=>ligature that’s shaped like⇒vs. Unicode character[0x21D2], which also looks like⇒? The ligature introduces an ambiguity that wasn’t there before.
Matt Birchler, “Mistaking Familiarity for Intuitiveness”:
But… this rings so true to me in some of the conversations I’ve had with people over the years, as well as Gruber’s recent complaints about the iPad overall.
What gets me to roll my eyes is when people drift into the “iPads aren’t as intuitive as Macs” argument, because that’s kind of insane.
He doesn’t come out and say that I said Macs are more intuitive than iPads, but it seems close. Let me point out that I used the word “intuitive” only twice in my piece on the awkwardness of iPadOS at 10: both times referring to iOS’s “just tap an app icon to open it” interface.
Most people get maybe 2% of the potential of their Macs and Windows PCs today. Have you watched most people use a computer lately? Most people I see have all apps in full screen all the time, no matter how big their screen is. Most people I see use keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, opening new tabs, but basically nothing else. I’ve seen numerous Mac users download apps, open the DMG, and run the app from the DMG forever because they don’t know you should move it to the Applications folder. Many people have a desktop full of files because the desktop is the file system.
All true. I strongly believe most people would be better off with iOS as their main computer than MacOS — including most Mac users today. It is a problem that most Mac users just store every file they have on the desktop. There is a huge opportunity on that point alone for iPadOS to surpass MacOS as the superior system for non-experts.
But how many people think iPadOS has a good interface for managing files? Crickets. The Mac interface for managing files is too overwhelming for typical users to understand, but somehow iPadOS offers something worse.
As I have to say in every one of these pieces, I’m not arguing that macOS is trash, nor am I arguing that iPad software is perfect and needs no refinement. I’m just saying that humans have a tendency to mistake familiarity for intuitiveness.
Again, my criticism about iPadOS has little to do with intuitiveness. If anything, what the iPad gets right is clearly more intuitive than the Mac — direct manipulation with touch vs. indirect manipulation via mouse pointer is clearly far more intuitive and natural. That’s what makes the state of iPadOS so crushingly disappointing — it has an inherent leg up on MacOS on intuitiveness by nature of its conceptual foundation. The problems with the iPad are about consistency, coherence, and discoverability. Launching the first on-screen app with a simple tap, but the second on-screen app with a tap-and-hold-then-drag-to-the-side-but-make-sure-you-drag-it-all-the-way-to-the-side-or-else-you’ll-get-Slide-Over is inconsistent, incoherent, and requires unnecessary dexterous precision. iPadOS should be less finicky than MacOS, but all of the multitasking features are the other way around.
And then there’s discoverability. Advanced iPad features are mostly invoked only by gestures — which gestures are not cohesively designed. The Mac is more complex — which is good for experts and would-be experts, but bad for typical users — but its complexity is almost entirely discoverable visually. You just move your mouse around the screen and click on things. That’s how you close any window. That’s how you put any window into or out of full-screen mode.1 Far more of iPadOS should be exposed by visual buttons and on-screen elements that you can look at and simply tap or drag with a single finger.
Affordances are not clutter. ★
I’ve never been a fan of full-screen mode on MacOS, and split-screen full-screen mode on the Mac is as inscrutable as on the iPad. It’s always felt bolted-on. Even the fact that the menu bar is hidden in full-screen mode is wrong. It’s trying to make the Mac into something contrary to its true nature, simply because many people want the visual simplicity of full-screen apps. Again, this is a huge missed opportunity for iPadOS, where full-screen mode is its true nature. ↩︎
Paul Lukas, writing for InsideHook:
Unless you’ve been living under a very large rock, you know that the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs will be facing off this Sunday in Super Bowl LIV. The Chiefs will be making their first Super Bowl appearance in 50 years, while the Niners have appeared in six Super Bowls during that span, winning five of them.
From a uniform standpoint, the party line for this game is that both teams have classic, great-looking designs that have gone largely unchanged over the years. That’s generally true, although there are loads of additional uniform-related subplots and storylines to consider if you know where to look. And the best place to look is in the column you are reading right now.
All of which is a longwinded way of saying welcome to the annual Uni Watch Super Bowl Preview, where we’ll break down everything you need to know about the aesthetics of the two teams competing this Sunday. Armed with the information presented herein, you can watch the game with a higher level of nuance and sophistication, while also
annoyingimpressing your friends with your knowledge of assorted Super Bowl uniform arcana.
I’m pulling for the Chiefs, but no argument that both teams have truly classic, top-tier unis.
Kenya Evelyn, reporting for The Guardian:
The US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, said in an interview on Thursday that the coronavirus outbreak could bring back jobs to America.
In controversial comments on morning TV, Ross remarked that the deadly illness that has broken out in China and is spreading internationally could lead to job growth for businesses in the US and Mexico. He was speaking during a segment on Fox Business Network.
Ross began by saying he did not “want to talk about a victory lap over a very unfortunate, very malignant disease” before discussing the potential economic benefits of the virus.
Ross is, at heart, every bit the ghoul he looks like. Kakistocracy: government by the worst people.
Kaya Yurieff, reporting for CNN Business:
“One critique of our approach for much of the last decade was that because we wanted to be liked, we didn’t always communicate our views as clearly because we were worried about offending people,” Zuckerberg said on a call with analysts.
He said his goal for the next decade “isn’t to be liked, but to be understood.” That’s because in order to be trusted, “people need to know where you stand,” Zuckerberg said.
The more you understand Facebook, the less you like or trust them. So: mission accomplished. Congrats, Zuck.
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today announced that all users in the United States can now experience a redesigned Maps with faster and more accurate navigation and comprehensive views of roads, buildings, parks, airports, malls and more, making it easier and more enjoyable to map out any journey. Apple completed the rollout of this new Maps experience in the United States and will begin rolling it out across Europe in the coming months.
The new map tiles are just great. I haven’t used Google Maps in forever. I know that’s not feasible worldwide, but Apple is closing the gap. If you haven’t looked at Apple Maps recently, you should.
Update: Justin O’Beirne, as usual, has copiously documented the changes.
Remember Knewz — a “news aggregation source” announced by News Corp back in August? It launched this week, and the visual design is worse than the name. It’s like the design brief was “Coked-up Drudge Report”.
Ryan Goodman, Just Security:
In that summer of 1974, seven Republicans joined the Democrats to vote for at least one article of impeachment, including Toni Railsback (Ill.), Hamilton Fish Jr. (N.Y.), Lawrence J. Hogan (Md.), M. Caldwell Butler (Va.), William S. Cohen (Maine), Harold V. Froehlich (Wis.), and Robert McClory (Ill.)
Ten Republicans voted against all three articles of impeachment: Edward Hutchinson (Mich.), David Dennis (Ind.), Delbert Latta (Ohio), Trent Lott (Miss.), Joseph Maraziti (N.J.), Wiley Mayne (Iowa), Carlos Moorhead (Calif.), Charles Sandman (N.J.), Henry Smith (N.Y.), and Charles Wiggins (Calif.).
Regardless of whether the congressmen voted for or against the articles of impeachment, their legacies were largely defined by this one moment. So much so that newspapers titled their obituaries with reference to this vote.
Regardless how Trump’s impeachment trial turns out, those Republicans who vote to acquit him — which may well be one and all of them — will forever be defined by that vote. To say that corruption is acceptable is itself a form of corruption.
My prediction: the most likely scenario is that the entire Republican Senate caucus votes unanimously to acquit. But the nature of Trump’s mob-style rule over the Republican Party is such that no dissent is allowed. None. If any Republicans stand up to Trump — even just a handful — the odds increase significantly that the whole dam will burst.
Tony Adams:
My name is Tony Adams. I’m an Astros fan. In November 2019, when the videos of the banging during some Astros 2017 games came out, I was horrified. It was clear within a minute of watching it was true — my team had cheated. To understand the scope of the cheating and the players involved, I decided to look at each home game from that season and determine any audio indicators of the sign stealing.
I wrote an application that downloaded the pitch data from MLB’s Statcast. This data has a timestamp for every pitch. I then downloaded the videos from YouTube and, using the timestamp, created a spectrogram for every pitch. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies in an audio file. I could then playback the video of the pitches and, helped by the visual of the spectrogram, determine if there was any banging before the pitch.
I initially thought it would be quick work, and the application did make it pretty straightforward, but there are a lot of pitches in an MLB season. I ended up watching and logging over 8,200 pitches. And some more than once to be sure I was as accurate as possible.
I love everything about this. The obsession, the presentation of the data, and most of all, the fact that Adams is an Astros fan, and rather than make excuses for his team’s cheating, he’s upset by it.
One bit that came of this. David Spampinato:
On August 4th, the game with the most trash can bangs, the Astros scored 16 earned runs. Mike Bolsinger, a Blue Jays reliever, allowed 4 earned runs in 0.1 IP. He never pitched in the big leagues again.
What a disgrace. MLB should strip the Astros of their World Series title.
20-year Apple veteran Chris “cricket” Hynes, on the origins of Aperture. Just an amazing and rare perspective on how things work — or last worked, past tense — inside Apple. The whole thing is just enthralling, but I’ll share a few nuggets:
I want to inject more levity into this interlude. Randy was always hilarious when he went on a rant. One of my favourites was when he ranted about flowcharts. He despised them. He went so far as to saying that anyone that makes a flowchart should be fired. We all thought it was funny!
The other rant was when we brought in some guy to write the red-eye filter. Since everyone was so busy, they just let him loose. It worked reasonably well when finished. But Randy discovered C++ code, despite the entire project being in Objective-C. Again, he went on a massive rant about how stupid that was, and Apple should fire anyone that writes C++ code. I somewhat agree.
Another:
One of my favourite stories involves an unnamed engineer that joined the team as one of the 130+ borrowed engineers. He was arrogant and was very vocal that every engineer on the original team sucked. At that point, I was running the bug review meetings. He’d stand in the back. When a bug came on screen, his typical response was ‘That code is shit, it needs to be rewritten’.
One day, a bug he wrote came up on the screen. Everyone in the room was scratching their heads about his poorly written bug. It was vague, rambling, and incoherent. So I said ‘this bug is shit, it needs to be rewritten’. Everyone in the room laughed but him. He seemed to redden.
Also, a few anecdotes about long-ago little birdie leaks to yours truly.
Jason Snell:
Apple’s wearables business is clearly successful and growing rapidly, as expressed in the Wearable/Home/Accessories category’s rapid growth. It was $10 billion in revenue for that category this quarter, up 37 percent from the year-ago quarter and marking 12 straight quarters of 20+% growth.
Apple provided a few fun tidbits in its description of what’s going on inside the Wearable/Home/Accessories bundle. Apple Watch set a new revenue record, though Apple won’t say what that record is. Perhaps more interesting even than that, the company claimed that 75 percent of Apple Watch purchases were from people who were new to the product.
75 percent new customers is a huge number, and suggests strongly that Apple Watch has come nowhere close to peaking yet. Not surprising to me, though. Most people will buy an Apple Watch and wear it for years.
Apple Watch sales aren’t all about the Series 5, either. Cook said that Apple couldn’t make enough of the $199/$299 Apple Watch Series 3. That’s a fascinating tidbit, because it suggests that — like the iPhone SE before it — Apple underestimated the amount of demand that its customers might have for a lower-priced, entry-level product. At $199, the Apple Watch Series 3 is priced similarly to a bunch of other fitness trackers — and it seems to have found some traction there.
Also not surprising to me at all, except for the fact that Apple didn’t accurately forecast demand. Of course the Series 3 is going to be insanely popular: that $200 price point is a major threshold for what typical people think a good watch should cost. I wouldn’t be surprised if come September, the Series 3 stays around for another year and drops to $149/179 (for 38/42mm), but $199/229 is a great base price.
Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery:
It’s tempting to dwell on the Jobs point — I really do think the iPad is the product that misses him the most — but the truth is that the long-term sustainable source of innovation on the iPad should have come from 3rd-party developers. Look at Gruber’s example for the Mac of graphic designers and illustrators: while MacPaint showed what was possible, the revolution was led by software from Aldus (PageMaker), Quark (QuarkXPress), and Adobe (Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat). By the time the Mac turned 10, Apple was a $2 billion company, while Adobe was worth $1 billion.
There are, needless to say, no companies built on the iPad that are worth anything approaching $1 billion in 2020 dollars, much less in 1994 dollars, even as the total addressable market has exploded, and one big reason is that $4.99 price point. Apple set the standard that highly complex, innovative software that was only possible on the iPad could only ever earn 5 bucks from a customer forever (updates, of course, were free).
There are developers making good money with professional caliber iPad apps. But nothing like the companies that were built around the Mac.
Will Sommer, writing for The Daily Beast:
As the global death toll from an alarming new coronavirus surged this week, promoters of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory were urging their fans to ward off the illness by purchasing and drinking dangerous bleach.
The substance — dubbed “Miracle Mineral Solution” or “MMS” — has long been promoted by fringe groups as a combination miracle cure and vaccine for everything from autism to cancer and HIV/AIDS.
The Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly warned consumers not to drink MMS, last year calling it effectively a “dangerous bleach” that could cause “severe vomiting” and “acute liver failure.” But those warnings haven’t stopped QAnon devotees — who believe in a world where Donald Trump is at war with shadowy deep-state “cabal” — from promoting a lethal substance as a salve for a health crisis that speaks to the darkest recesses of fringe thought.
Drink up, morons. And don’t forget to rinse your eyes with that stuff, too — that’s how the virus spreads.
Bill Chappell, reporting for NPR:
Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has been arrested and criminally charged with making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the U.S. Defense Department about his ties to a Chinese government program to recruit foreign scientists and researchers.
The Justice Department says Lieber, 60, lied about his contact with the Chinese program known as the Thousand Talents Plan, which the U.S. has previously flagged as a serious intelligence concern. He also is accused of lying about about a lucrative contract he signed with China’s Wuhan University of Technology.
In an affidavit unsealed Tuesday, FBI Special Agent Robert Plumb said Lieber, who led a Harvard research group focusing on nanoscience, had established a research lab at the Wuhan university — apparently unbeknownst to Harvard. […]
The arrangement between Lieber and the Chinese institution spanned “significant” periods of time between at least 2012 and 2017, according to the affidavit. It says the deal called for Lieber to be paid up to $50,000 a month, in addition to $150,000 per year “for living and personal expenses.”
This is a lot worse than stiffing your university with a $200K tab for strip clubs and Candy Crush in-app purchases.
Ten years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad on stage at the Yerba Buena theater in San Francisco. It surprised everyone, in several ways. Some expected a touchscreen Mac with a stylus. Some expected a product that would do for the news industry what the iPod had done for the music industry a decade prior. Most expected a $1,000 starting price. The iPad was none of those things. It was also Jobs’s final big new product announcement.
“It’s just a big iPhone” was the most common initial criticism. Turns out, “just a big iPhone” was a fantastic idea for a new product — music to tens of millions of iPhone users’ ears.
Jobs’s on-stage pitch was exactly right. The iPad was a new class of device, sitting between a phone and a laptop. To succeed, it needed not only to be better at some things than either a phone or laptop, it needed to be much better. It was and is.
Ten years later, though, I don’t think the iPad has come close to living up to its potential. By the time the Mac turned 10, it had redefined multiple industries. In 1984 almost no graphic designers or illustrators were using computers for work. By 1994 almost all graphic designers and illustrators were using computers for work. The Mac was a revolution. The iPhone was a revolution. The iPad has been a spectacular success, and to tens of millions it is a beloved part of their daily lives, but it has, to date, fallen short of revolutionary.
iPad hardware is undeniably great. Lower-priced models are excellent consumer tablets, and are the cheapest personal computers Apple has ever made. They remain perfectly useful for many years. The iPads Pro outperform MacBooks computationally. They’re thin, light, reliable, gorgeous, and yet despite their impressive computational performance they need no fans.
Software is where the iPad has gotten lost. iPadOS’s “multitasking” model is far more capable than the iPhone’s, yes, but somehow Apple has painted it into a corner in which it is far less consistent and coherent than the Mac’s, while also being far less capable. iPad multitasking: more complex, less powerful. That’s quite a combination.
Consider the basic task of putting two apps on screen at the same time, the basic definition of “multitasking” in the UI sense. To launch the first app, you tap its icon on the homescreen, just like on the iPhone, and just like on the iPad before split-screen multitasking. Tapping an icon to open an app is natural and intuitive. But to get a second app on the same screen, you cannot tap its icon. You must first slide up from the bottom of the screen to reveal the Dock. Then you must tap and hold on an app icon in the Dock. Then you drag the app icon out of the Dock to launch it in a way that it will become the second app splitting the display. But isn’t dragging an icon out of the Dock the way that you remove apps from the Dock? Yes, it is — when you do it from the homescreen. So the way you launch an app in the Dock for split-screen mode is identical to the way you remove that app from the Dock. Oh, and apps that aren’t in the Dock can’t become the second app in split screen mode. What sense does that limitation make?
On the iPhone you can only have one app on screen at a time. The screen is the app; the app is the screen. This is limiting but trivial to understand. On the Mac you can have as many apps on screen at the same time as you want, and you launch the second, third, or twentieth app exactly the same way that you launch the first. That is consistency. On iPad you can only have two apps on screen at the same time, and you must launch them in entirely different ways — one of them intuitive (tap any app icon), one of them inscrutable (drag one of the handful of apps you’ve placed in your Dock). And if you don’t quite drag the app from the Dock far enough to the side of the screen, it launches in “Slide Over”, an entirely different shared-screen rather than split-screen mode. The whole concept is not merely inconsistent, it’s incoherent.
How would anyone ever figure out how to split-screen multitask on the iPad if they didn’t already know how to do it?
On the iPhone, you always launch apps the same way: tapping their icons. On the Mac, it’s slightly more complex. In most contexts — the Dock, LaunchPad, Spotlight results — you launch apps by single-clicking them; in the Finder, however, you must double-click them. There’s a method to that seeming madness — you must double-click to open something on the Mac in any context where single-clicking will merely select that item. But the Mac’s “When do I click, when do I double-click?” issue has confused untold millions of non-expert users for decades. How many people have you seen who double-click links in a web browser? The iPhone’s simplicity eliminated this sort of confusion. No one needlessly double-taps tappable items on iPhone. The iPad, originally, shared this simplicity and clarity. When the iPad debuted it was, from top to bottom, easier to understand than the Mac, and you could learn everything there was to learn about it just by tapping and sliding to explore. It was impossible to get lost or confused.
As things stand today, I get a phone call from my mom once a month or so because she’s accidentally gotten Safari into split-screen mode when tapping links in Mail or Messages and can’t get out.
I like my iPad very much, and use it almost every day. But if I could go back to the pre-split-screen, pre-drag-and-drop interface I would. Which is to say, now that iPadOS has its own name, I wish I could install the iPhone’s one-app-on-screen-at-a-time, no-drag-and-drop iOS on my iPad Pro. I’d do it in a heartbeat and be much happier for it.
The iPad at 10 is, to me, a grave disappointment. Not because it’s “bad”, because it’s not bad — it’s great even — but because great though it is in so many ways, overall it has fallen so far short of the grand potential it showed on day one. To reach that potential, Apple needs to recognize they have made profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface, mistakes that need to be scrapped and replaced, not polished and refined. I worry that iPadOS 13 suggests the opposite — that Apple is steering the iPad full speed ahead down a blind alley. ★
Another blockbuster security story last week, initially broken by Stephanie Kirchgaessner for The Guardian:
The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian.
The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world’s richest man, according to the results of a digital forensic analysis.
This analysis found it “highly probable” that the intrusion into the phone was triggered by an infected video file sent from the account of the Saudi heir to Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post.
The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on 1 May of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity.
Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used.
You will recall that The National Enquirer published intimate text messages and personal photographs from Bezos that revealed an extramarital affair, which in turn led to Bezos and his wife of 25 years divorcing.
Bezos unsurprisingly launched his own investigation into how the text messages and photos had been stolen from his phone and wound up in the hands of the Enquirer. According to Bezos’s team, early evidence pointed to Saudi Arabia. That Bezos’s investigators had evidence pointing to the Saudis spooked Enquirer publisher David Pecker enough that Pecker literally attempted to extort Bezos — offering not to publish additional photos in the Enquirer’s possession in exchange for Bezos dropping his investigation. Needless to say, Bezos told Pecker to fuck off, in a remarkably cogent open letter publicly revealing both the extortion scheme and Bezos’s investigative team’s suspicion that the Saudis were the culprits.1
At the time, there was much speculation as to how the Saudis hacked Bezos’s phone. Did they have agents intercepting his cellular signal? Technically possible, perhaps, especially if the text messages were SMS (we still don’t know what type of “texts” they were — we now know Bezos and MBS texted via WhatsApp, but we don’t know how Bezos and his girlfriend texted), but if the Saudis had in fact captured the information over the air, how would Bezos’s investigators ever have detected it months after the fact?
Now, we seemingly know. Bezos had a personal relationship with MBS and MBS personally sent Bezos the payload to exploit his phone. The evidence is strong enough and the allegations serious enough that the United Nations has issued a report on the matter, considers it part of a pattern of human rights violations from the Saudi regime, and is calling for the United States to further investigate.
But — but! — two days ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that federal prosecutors in Manhattan have evidence that The National Enquirer obtained the photos from Lauren Sanchez’s brother, who in turn was sent them from his sister’s phone. Whether Lauren Sanchez sent them to her brother, or her brother had access to her phone and sent them to his phone from her phone himself, is unclear, but the fact that Bezos and Sanchez are still together suggests Bezos believes the latter. It seems entirely possible that the Saudis pwned Bezos’s phone but that it was his girlfriend’s brother who betrayed them to The Enquirer. Or, more conspiratorially, perhaps her brother — a prominent Trump supporter with ties to the recently convicted felon and Trump advisor Roger Stone, a man who describes himself as a “dirty trickster” — was in cahoots with the Saudis and the Enquirer to cover their tracks.
This whole saga is extraordinary to say the least. With zero hyperbole, it sounds like the pitch for a Hollywood thriller:
The richest man in the world — a billionaire a hundred times over — meets and exchanges phone numbers with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the most powerful dictator in the Middle East. The richest man in the world happens to own, as a mere side business, The Washington Post — a newspaper whose news coverage and opinion columns have been highly critical of the Saudi Arabian royal family’s brutal and regressive regime. The crown prince uses this superficial personal relationship with the richest man in the world to hack his phone via an infected attachment sent in a WhatsApp chat, using military-grade technology seemingly created by NSO Group, a secretive firm from Israel that supposedly only offers its services to trusted governments. Among the information the Saudis exfiltrate from the richest man in the world’s phone are text messages and intimate photos revealing an extramarital affair, which wind up published in The National Enquirer, whose publisher has long been a trusted confidant of the corrupt president of the United States, and had a stack of scandalous stories regarding said corrupt president’s own extra-marital affairs locked in a safe as part of a decades-long conspiracy to keep those scandals out of the public eye. Said corrupt president of the United States is also a vociferous critic of The Washington Post and its owner, the richest man in the world. The publication of these intimate texts and photos leads to the dissolution of the richest man in the world’s 25-year marriage, and unsurprisingly angers him, leading him to hire a team of investigators to figure out how the texts and images from his phone were stolen. A few months later a team of Saudi agents brutally murders and dismembers Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi — who was — wait for it — a journalist at The Washington Post whose columns were scathingly critical of the Saudi regime. The CIA soon determines that the Saudi hit team was acting at the direct behest of the crown prince; when informed of this, the corrupt president of the United States brushes it off with a more-or-less “Shit happens, what do you expect when you criticize our friends the Saudis? Those guys play hardball.” response.
Oh. And the corrupt president of the United States is also a nepotist. His son-in-law is a senior White House advisor with a sprawling portfolio of responsibilities, a top-secret security clearance that was granted only because the president demanded it (overriding concerns of national security officials). Said son-in-law is known to communicate with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia via — wait for it — WhatsApp.2
I take it back, this is not the pitch for a movie. It’s the pitch for a season-long TV series. My proposed title: Hacked to Bits. ★
Bezos, in his 2017 letter to shareholders: “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of ‘study hall.’ ”
The idea is that lazy thinking, if not outright sophistry, is easily disguised within slide decks, but narrative prose — not bullet points but a real narrative — forces the writer to think everything through. Writing is thinking, I’ve always thought, too. I frequently start a column thinking my argument is A, but as I write, I realize I was wrong and in fact my argument is Z. It’s the act of writing that forces you to think the idea through right down to the bedrock. Anyway, Bezos’s open letter revealing the Enquirer’s scheme and his suspicion that the Saudis were the culprits shows that, unsurprisingly, he’s a remarkably cogent writer. Reminds me of someone else. ↩︎
I actually think it’s unlikely that MBS hacked Kushner’s phone. Think about it. The hack of Bezos’s phone was eventually uncovered. If he hacked Kushner, it would have come out eventually too. Trump is embarrassingly cozy with the Saudis, but he would surely be furious if it were revealed the Saudis hacked Kushner’s phone. However useful hacking Kushner’s phone would be to their intelligence gathering, it couldn’t possibly be worth spoiling their relationship with Trump. Killing and dismembering a journalist working for The Washington Post ought to outrage the president. Hacking the phone of an American citizen — any American, prince or pauper — ought to outrage the president. But hacking the phone of someone in his family actually would. Trump’s strident antipathy toward Bezos effectively served as a free pass for the Saudis to hack his phone. That the United Nations is more outraged than the United States says it all.
But, still, the fact that it’s even possible that MBS did the same thing to Kushner that he did to Bezos — combined with the fact that security officials in the U.S. were alarmed by Kushner’s use of WhatsApp all along — is deeply concerning, to say the least. ↩︎︎