Linked List: April 15, 2015

Wednesday, 15 April 2015

The Talk Show: ‘Browser Pooped on the Wee-Wee Pad’ 

New episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, featuring special guest Joanna Stern. We talk about (what else?) Apple Watch and the new MacBook.

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Apple Watch Accessibility 

Nice to see Apple Watch ship with solid accessibility support right from the get-go.

See also: New guided tours for the Phone, Siri, Maps, and Music apps for Apple Watch.

Little Kids Choose Between iPhone and Galaxy S6 

Not sure whether this speaks more to Apple’s design prowess or brand standing.

EU Accuses Google Shopping of Search ‘Abuse’ 

BBC News:

The European Union has filed a complaint against Google over its alleged anti-competitive behaviour. The competition commissioner said she had issued a “statement of objections”, stating that the firm’s promotion of its own shopping links amounted to an abuse of its dominance in search. […]

Google accounts for more than a 90% of EU-based web searches.

I think Google’s going to lose this and be fined, but the fine will be a relative pittance. What I’m curious about is why Google’s web search share is so much higher in Europe than in the U.S. Better support for languages other than English?

Karl Lagerfeld’s Apple Watch Has a Gold Link Bracelet 

Called it. This is the first time we’ve ever seen such a thing, but I don’t think it’s one-of-a-kind. They’ll sell this eventually, and it’ll cost $30-40K.

p.s. Lagerfeld hasn’t even set this one up yet — the screen that’s shown here is the setup screen for pairing with your iPhone. You point your iPhone’s camera at your watch on this screen and it figures out which way it’s oriented, and boom, they’re paired.

p.p.s. Even just a few years ago I would not have expected I’d ever create a “Karl Lagerfeld” tag here on DF.

p.p.p.s. They’re not exposed publicly, but I’ve been tagging every entry on DF since I started writing it back in 2002.

Andy Hertzfeld on ‘Becoming Steve Jobs’ 

Also at Medium’s Backchannel, Andy Hertzfeld has an interesting take on Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s Becoming Steve Jobs:

There have been dozens of books already written about Steve Jobs, including Walter Isaacson’s best-selling, magisterial biography, which is based on over 40 exclusive interviews with the man himself. Becoming Steve Jobs distinguishes itself by emphasizing a narrative of growth and change, depicting “the evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader.” Unfortunately, the authors attempt to bolster their case by exaggerating flaws and missteps in the first half of Steve’s career while diminishing them after his return to Apple in 1997.

I was surprised and chagrined by the negative tone pervading the description of Steve’s first tenure at Apple, which is somehow both a “management mess” and the fastest growing company ever. Mike Markkula is an early mentor “for better or worse.” When Steve, inspired by his visit to Xerox PARC, decides to attempt to bring the graphical user interface to the masses, he has to “deliver on this promise within the gnawing confines of Apple.”

I didn’t take Schlender and Tetzeli’s take on early Apple as overly negative. To my reading, their take on early Apple described what is patently obvious in hindsight: a company with remarkable, genius product teams, but an executive leadership team that did not and perhaps could not create a sustainable culture. Early Apple was a company with sporadic hits interspersed with years-long dry patches. The first good CEO Apple ever had was Steve Jobs 2.0 in 1997.

Hertzfeld’s Revolution in the Valley — available free of charge on the web, but well-worth buying in print — is my favorite book on Apple ever written, by the way.

Steven Levy: ‘What the Apple Watch Means for the Age of Notifications’ 

Steven Levy, writing for Medium’s Backchannel:

We aren’t at that level of desperation yet with online notifications. But the Age of Notifications is about to face its biggest mess yet, as alerts move from phone screens to watch faces. Notifications are just about the entire point of a smart watch — you’re not going to be reading books, watching movies or doing spreadsheets on them.

I disagree, strongly, that “notifications are just about the entire point of a smart watch” — or at least for Apple Watch. There’s a reason why Apple didn’t mention notifications prominently at either of their Apple Watch events. Take another look at Apple’s Watch pages on their website, and see how much attention is paid to notifications.

But, notifications are without question one of many important features. And if you feel like your watch is more annoying than helpful, you’re not going to wear that watch. One of the most important pieces on Apple Watch in the last few weeks was Jeremy Keith’s, which wasn’t about the Apple Watch itself but rather about being ruthlessly parsimonious with regard to allowing apps to send you notifications in the first place.

Back to Levy:

So what’s the solution? We need a great artificial intelligence effort to comb through our information, assess the urgency and relevance, and use a deep knowledge of who we are and what we think is important to deliver the right notifications at the right time. As time goes on, we will trust such a system to effectively filter all our information and dole it out just as needed.

I think he’s on to something here: some sort of AI for filtering notification does seem useful. I can imagine helping it by being able to give (a) a thumbs-down to a notification that went through to your watch that you didn’t want to see there; and (b) a thumbs-up to a notification on your phone or PC that wasn’t filtered through to your more personal devices but which you wish had been.

But: this sounds too much like spam filtering to me. True spam is unasked-for. Notifications are all things for which you explicitly opted in, and can opt out of at any moment.

Horace Dediu: ‘The Watch’ 

Horace Dediu:

Realizing that on the iPhone the “phone” is but an app — one which I find populated with FaceTime calls rather than cellular calls and whose messaging history is filled with iMessage threads rather than SMS — I consider it safe to say what the iPhone is today not as much a phone as a very personal computer. And so the question is whether the Watch will quickly leave behind its timekeeping anchor and move into being something completely different.

I had the chance to use the Watch for a few days and can say that timekeeping is probably as insignificant to its essence as it’s possible to be. It feels like a watch in the physical sense, looking good in the process (as the iPhone physically felt like a phone, also without being hard on the eyes)

However it does not feel like a watch conceptually.

Great piece, and I think Horace is onto something important. But I subtly disagree. The more I live with Apple Watch, the more I think it is just a watch. Pre-iPhone, a “phone” was something we used for voice calls and text messaging. Post-iPhone, a “phone” now means a networked personal computer in your pocket or purse.

If you think of a “watch” as purely a device for telling the time of day, then Apple Watch is not just a watch. But if you think of a “watch” as a wrist-worn glance-able display of status information (including, perhaps prominently, perhaps not, the time of day), and as a signifier of your personal taste and style, then Apple Watch is very much a watch. The difference is that it’s a watch imagined from the ground up for the modern era of ubiquitous wireless networking and powerful minuscule computers.