Linked List: April 29, 2015

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Windows 10 to Run Recompiled Android and iOS Apps ★

Tom Warren, reporting from Microsoft’s Build conference for The Verge:

The idea is simple, get apps on Windows 10 without the need for developers to rebuild them fully for Windows. While it sounds simple, the actual process will be a little more complicated than just pushing a few buttons to recompile apps.

Only the problem is simple: Windows Phone doesn’t have enough apps, and doesn’t have any developer momentum. It’s a third platform in a two-platform world.

The solution sounds complicated. Games are one thing — cross-compilation and shared code bases work fine for many games. But for actual apps, running apps designed for platform A on platform B never looks or feels right, even if technically it “works”. Running apps from platforms A and B on platform C? Yikes.

During Microsoft’s planning for bringing iOS and Android apps to Windows, Myerson admits it wasn’t always an obvious choice to have both. “At times we’ve thought, let’s just do iOS,” Myerson explains. “But when we think of Windows we really think of everyone on the planet. There’s countries where iOS devices aren’t available.”

You can please some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time — but Microsoft remains constitutionally drawn to the pipe dream of pleasing all of the people all of the time.

Dan Frommer:

Now five years old, Apple’s iPad tablet is still the company’s fastest-selling product line of all time. But not for long. As iPad demand has slowed, its cumulative sales curve is likely to fall behind the iPhone’s within the next six months.

The iPad, launched in early 2010, set records as the fastest Apple product to hit 10 million shipments (during its first year); 100 million (third year); and 250 million (fifth year). But its trajectory has flattened. Shipments last quarter, which Apple revealed yesterday, fell 23% year-over-year to 12.6 million.

I think the iPad is sort of like a young phenom in sports. It came on so fast, so strong, that many keen observers — including me — expected it to eclipse the iPhone.

That isn’t panning out. But I think we, collectively, are now judging the iPad’s actual sales and success not for what they are but for what we expected they were going to be. It’s a good, popular, much-used family of products that continues to sell really well. Not iPhone-well, but well. Being only the second-fastest-selling product in Apple history, instead of the first, is nothing to sneeze at.

Secret Shutting Down ★

Brendan Klinkenberg, reporting for BuzzFeed:

In a post on Medium, founder David Byttow addressed and expanded upon the decision to shut down Secret. “Unfortunately, Secret does not represent the vision I had when starting the company,” Byttow writes, “so I believe it’s the right decision for myself, our investors and our team.”

In the post, Byttow announced that Secret will be returning the “significant” amount of invested capital still in the company’s possession to its investors. Secret had reportedly raised more than $37 million, at a valuation of over $100 million.

$100 million valuation. Here’s a secret for you: anyone who invested in Secret is a dope.

Best line in this whole saga is the closing sentence of Mike Isaac’s report for the NYT:

Mr. Byttow’s once-prized red Ferrari is also gone, a person with knowledge of the matter said.

‘I Screwed Up The Academy Awards, and I Couldn’t Be More Proud’ ★

Great link re: the previous item: David Letterman guesting on the final episode of The Jon Stewart Show on MTV back in 1995. (Thanks to Orion Woody.)

David Letterman Reflects on 33 Years in Late-Night Television ★

Fantastic, candid interview with Letterman by Dave Itzkoff for the NYT:

Q: Did you have any involvement in choosing Stephen Colbert as your successor?

A: No. Not my show. When we sign off, we’re out of business with CBS. I always thought Jon Stewart would have been a good choice. And then Stephen. And then I thought, well, maybe this will be a good opportunity to put a black person on, and it would be a good opportunity to put a woman on. Because there are certainly a lot of very funny women that have television shows everywhere. So that would have made sense to me as well.

Q: But you were not consulted?

A: [shakes head no] Mm-mmm.

Q: Did that bother you?

A: Yeah, I guess so. Just as a courtesy, maybe somebody would say: “You know, we’re kicking around some names. Do you have any thoughts here?” But it doesn’t bother me now. At the time, I had made the decision [to leave] and I thought, O.K., this is what comes when you make this decision.

Stewart was always my pick, too.

Regarding Recode’s Report That ‘No Defective Apple Watches Reached Consumers’ ★

Strange piece reported by Dawn Chmielewski for Recode, on the faulty taptic engines plaguing Apple Watch production, starting with the headline: “No Defective Apple Watches Reached Consumers”:

Apple identified a flaw in a critical component of its Apple Watch before any of them were shipped to consumers, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

This certainly makes it sound as though Chmielewski has her own sources for this story, and isn’t just repeating what the WSJ reported earlier today.

The part, known as the taptic engine, produces a subtle tap on the wrist to alert the wearer of an incoming message or other notification. Quality assurance testing revealed that some of these components supplied by AAC Technologies Holdings in Shenzhen, China, would break over time, the Wall Street Journal reported.

But now she’s attributing it to the Journal. This strikes me as vague sourcing — does Chmielewski have her own “people familiar with the matter” or is she only re-reporting from the WSJ? (Update: I think what happened — think — is that after the WSJ story broke, Apple contacted Chmielewski, Moorhead (see below) and the WSJ itself (see “Update 1”, below) to emphasize, off the record, that the problem was identified before the defective taptic engines were shipped to customers. But the sourcing on this story doesn’t make clear what’s coming from the WSJ’s original report and what’s coming from these new sources “familiar with the matter”.)

Apple has shifted production to a second supplier, Japan’s Nidec, which didn’t experience this problem, according to the Journal.

“I believe no faulty Apple Watches were shipped to consumers,” said Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategy. “I don’t think this is damaging at all.”

As I experienced firsthand, and as I’ve heard from at least one DF reader (whom I know and trust), some watches shipped to consumers do have faulting taptic engines. That doesn’t mean it’s a widespread problem, of course. When you make millions of anything, there are surely all sorts of rare problems that crop up. And for all I know, the failed taptic engine in my first review unit might have been from Nidec, not AAC Technologies.

What struck me about this quote, and Recode’s decision to base their headline on it, is how would Patrick Moorhead — an independent “technology analyst” — know whether any of the faulty taptic engines from AAC shipped to consumers? Is he just speculating based on the fact that there aren’t widespread complaints? If he really is in a position to know this information, should Recode explain how he knows it?

I don’t know how anyone outside Apple would know whether faulty or possibly faulty taptic engines from AAC shipped to consumers. But signs suggest that some of them — even if just a handful — did ship.

Update 1: The WSJ’s report breaking this story has been updated with a new third paragraph, which wasn’t there in earlier revisions:

Apple doesn’t plan a recall, because there’s no indication that Apple shipped any watches with the defective part to customers.

Apple Details How It Rebuilt Siri on Apache Mesos ★

Yet another sign of a more open Apple — Siri engineers spoke in public about the third-generation (and as I noted a few months ago, much improved) back-end for Siri. Some notes from Derrick Harris, writing for the Mesosphere blog:

Apple’s custom Mesos scheduler is called J.A.R.V.I.S., which is short for Just A Rather Very Intelligent Scheduler. It’s named after Tony Stark’s intelligent computer assistant in the Iron Man movies (and technically, I’m told, his human butler in the old comic books). […]

Siri’s Mesos backend represents its third generation, and a move away from “traditional” infrastructure. Apple’s work with Mesos and J.A.R.V.I.S. predates the open-sourcing of Marathon (by Mesosphere) and Apache Aurora (by Twitter) in 2013.

Not only has Mesos helped make Siri scalable and available on the infrastructure front, it has also improved latency on the app itself.

It really does show, and it matters. Siri’s performance and reliability are essential to the Apple Watch experience.

On Baltimore’s No-Crowd Baseball Game This Afternoon ★

Paul Kafasis on the decision to play today’s Orioles-White Sox game in Baltimore in an empty Camden Yards:

Holding a sporting event in the middle of a rioting city is fraught enough, but at least a claim could be made of doing it for the fans desiring a dose of normality. Playing to an empty stadium, however, will only alienate the public further. If a city isn’t safe enough to host a baseball game in front of a crowd, it shouldn’t host a baseball game at all.

“Keep Calm and Carry On” has become a household phrase, but we, as a country, sure don’t act like it. If you want to restore normalcy, act normal. I watched some of today’s game on TV, and there were no signs at all that they couldn’t have played the game normally. Fans stood on the street and watched the game in peace.

Moving the game to the afternoon made sense. Playing without any fans in the park was a mistake.

WSJ: ‘Apple Watch: Faulty Taptic Engine Slows Roll Out’ ★

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Lorraine Luk, reporting for the WSJ:

A key component of the Apple Watch made by one of two suppliers was found to be defective, prompting Apple Inc. to limit the availability of the highly anticipated new product, according to people familiar with the matter.

The part involved is the so-called taptic engine, designed by Apple to produce the sensation of being tapped on the wrist. After mass production began in February, reliability testing revealed that some taptic engines supplied by AAC Technologies Holdings Inc., of Shenzhen, China, started to break down over time, the people familiar with the matter said. One of those people said Apple scrapped some completed watches as a result.

Taptic engines produced by a second supplier, Japan’s Nidec Corp., didn’t experience the same problem, the people said. Apple has moved nearly all of its production of the component to Nidec, these people said, but it may take time for Nidec to increase its production.

Recall that my first review unit had a bum taptic engine — it worked when I first started using it, but struck me as weak. By the end of the first day it wasn’t working at all, and Apple supplied me with a second watch the next day. I’ve also heard from at least one DF reader whose Apple Watch Sport had a non-functioning taptic engine (he got it replaced at his local Apple Store). So some of these have made it out of the factories and into the wild. But it certainly doesn’t seem to be a rampant problem in the field.

The closing paragraph of the Journal’s story is a bizarre jab:

The shortages highlight the potential downside of Apple’s lean supply chain. Apple can produce massive quantities of products with little waste and excess supply, but it can experience shortages when a problem arises with a key part.

As a friend quipped to me by text, “So the potential downside of the most successful manufacturing system in history is that when they run out of parts they can’t make stuff.” The potential downside isn’t with Apple’s supply chain — it’s with Apple’s use of brand-new never-before-manufactured-at-scale components. It’s the inherent risk of any groundbreaking new product. What in the world is the Journal suggesting Apple should do differently?

Update: The WSJ report now contains a new third paragraph, which wasn’t there when it was first reported:

Apple doesn’t plan a recall, because there’s no indication that Apple shipped any watches with the defective part to customers.