Linked List: September 18, 2015

Friday, 18 September 2015

Dave Mark:

With a content blocker enabled, I followed a link to a story on CNET.com. Here’s what I saw.

It didn’t take long for the whack-a-mole game to begin.

Ben Thompson:

This bifurcation in incentives has resulted in a plethora of ad networks: publishers collectively provide real estate in front of collated readers, while it is the responsibility of the ad networks to identify and track prospective customers on behalf of advertisers. Note, though, the orthogonality of this relationship: publishers and ad networks are working at cross-purposes.

The result is that ad networks don’t really care about the readers — which is a big reason Why Web Pages Suck — and on the flip-side publishers don’t really care about the advertisers, resulting in click fraud, pixel stuffing, ad stacking, and a whole host of questionable behavior that is at best on the edge of legality and absolutely not in the advertisers’ interest.

As with any other company or industry built on fundamentally misaligned incentives, this is unsustainable.

What we’re seeing this week was inevitable. A key observation on ad-blocking:

Notice that none of this depends on the adoption of ad-blockers. Indeed, ad blockers don’t really hurt advertisers that much anyways: an ad that is blocked is one that is not paid for, meaning the pain falls entirely on publishers. But, as I just noted, the truth is that advertising isn’t long for the majority of online publishing anyway.

I disagree with that last sentence. I just think online advertising as we know it — with the tracking, slow page loads, ads that cover the content, everything that could be fairly described as hostile to the reading/viewing/listening experience — isn’t going to work much longer.

Good advertising goes down easy.

Apple Watch Satisfaction ★

Pogue’s aforelinked criticism of Apple Watch as being too complex made me think back to this months-ago piece from Ben Bajarin, regarding a customer satisfaction survey he helped Wristly conduct:

As I listened to 14 different people tell me about their Apple Watch, I observed a pattern. Those whose job it was to think about the Apple Watch or who were early adopters who thought deeply about tech and the tech products they buy, were all much more critical of the watch. You could tell they evaluated it and thought about it deeply from every angle by their responses. Then I talked with teachers, firefighters, insurance agents, and those not in the tech industry and not hard-core techies. These groups of people couldn’t stop raving about the Apple Watch and how much they loved the product. It was almost as if the farther away people were from tech or the tech industry, the more they liked the Apple Watch.

As we filtered the customer satisfaction answers by profile we saw something that fit this observation. While every profile ranked high in one of the two top satisfaction responses, it was the non-tech users who ranked the highest for “very satisfied/delighted” by the Apple Watch.

Whether it’s good or bad for Apple Watch in the long-term, I don’t know, but I think there’s something to this.

David Pogue: ‘A Humble Proposition: How to Fix the Apple Watch’ ★

David Pogue makes the case that Apple Watch’s interaction model is too complicated, and proposes a redesign. It’s interesting in and of itself that Pogue would be making an argument that an Apple product is too complicated, and I think he makes several good points, many of which are in line with my analysis back in May. But at the outset, I think Pogue overreaches:

Here’s the central problem: Apple went overboard with input mechanisms.

How many ways are there to interact with the touchscreen of a phone or tablet? Four: tap, swipe, tap-and-hold, or pinch.

How about navigating your laptop? Four ways: Click, right-click, or slide on the trackpad, or use the keyboard.

But on the Apple Watch, there are eight ways to operate: Turn the crown (the knob on the side). Click the crown inward. Tap the side button. Hold in the side button. Tap the screen. Hard-press the screen. Swipe across the screen. Pinch the screen.

Describing the iPhone and iPad, he omits the home button, which can be clicked, double-clicked, clicked-and-held, and on Touch ID devices, touched — all of which do different things. And Android devices add more buttons: Back and whatever they call the button for switching.

A digital crown and one additional button are not too many inputs. If Apple watch suffers from being overly complex, the fault lies entirely in the interaction model. A good interaction model can allow for many forms of input without confusion; a bad model can seem confusing with just one form of input.

Apple’s ‘Move to iOS’ App Gets Blasted With 2700 1-Star Reviews by Angry Android Users ★

Benjamin Mayo, writing at 9to5Mac:

Very few of the commenters seemed to have actually used the app to migrate data to an iPhone and are instead using the reviews section to vent their frustration at Apple in general. The reviews are dominated by Android users complaining about iPhone battery life, overpriced Apple Watches, ‘iSheep’ and more.

Here’s a selection of the reviews in the store.

Hilarious.

The Talk Show: ‘If Only the Death Star Had That’ ★

Just in time for your weekend listening pleasure, a new episode of my podcast, The Talk Show. Special guest Rene Ritchie returns to the show to discuss last week’s blockbuster Apple Event and the products that were announced: Apple Watch updates, the iPad Pro (and Smart Keyboard, and Apple Pencil), the all-new Apple TV, and the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, and iOS 9.

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The Lost Apple Logos You’ve Never Seen ★

Great 2012 post from TheBrainFever illustrating the evolution of Apple’s six-color classic logo. I’d never seen some of these before.

Masters of the Small Canvas ★

Nice piece by John Pavlus for Businessweek on the role of icon (and now, emoji) design in the modern world.

Speaking of Lawsuits That Will Not Go Away ★

Andrew Chung, reporting for Reuters:

A U.S. appeals court on Thursday said Apple should have been awarded an injunction barring Samsung from selling products that infringe its patents, handing Apple another victory in its ongoing smartphone fight with its biggest rival.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. said the lower court abused its discretion when it denied Apple Inc an injunction after a jury ordered Samsung Electronics Co Ltd to pay $120 million in May, 2014 for infringing three of Apple’s patents.

The case involved Apple patents covering the iPhone’s slide-to-unlock, autocorrect and data detection features.

Apple Will Ask Supreme Court to Hear Its E-Book Price-Fixing Case ★

Roger Parloff, reporting for Fortune:

Judge Cote’s ruling against Apple was upheld this past June, 2-1, by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

At the time of the appellate loss, Apple’s press statement hinted that it might take this step: “While we want to put this behind us,” the company asserted at the time, “the case is about principles and values. We know we did nothing wrong back in 2010 and are assessing next steps.”

Whatever your stance on the case, know one thing: Apple really is standing on principle here. They truly believe they did nothing wrong, nothing illegal.

The G.O.P. Debate: Crowded, Bloated, Sour, and Trump ★

Amy Davidson, writing for The New Yorker on last night’s Republican debate:

Trump’s core supporters may not mind his performance, even though, at times, he seemed to be insulting people just to stay awake, like a truck driver lighting another cigarette. He was missing what he would call his usual “braggadocious” verve. It’s going to be a strange and pot-holed road on the way to 2016.