Linked List: October 13, 2015

Tuesday, 13 October 2015

On Apple’s ‘Insurmountable’ Platform Advantage 

Provocative piece by Steve Cheney:

The truth is the best people in chip design no longer want to work at Intel or Qualcomm. They want to work at Apple. I have plenty of friends in the Valley who affirm this. Sure Apple products are cooler. But Apple has also surpassed Intel in performance. This is insane. A device company — which makes CPUs for internal use — surpassing Intel, the world’s largest chip maker which practically invented the CPU and has thousands of customers.

This pedigree that Apple developed now has a secondary powerful force: portable devices serve as the reference platform whereby all chip design starts. Components from the smartphone market now power almost all other markets, giving Apple’s in-house team a comparative advantage as they enter new product categories, like wearables and electric cars.

In the old days, when Macs ran on PowerPC chips (or even older days, when they ran on Motorola 680 × 0 chips), Macs were generally slower than their PC counterparts. Every once in a while Apple could jump ahead, but only briefly. In the long run, Apple couldn’t compete with Intel-based PCs on specs. Then, Apple switched to Intel chips, and the competition was over — raw computational power was no longer a factor, because all personal computers were using Intel CPUs.

I don’t think it has gotten through the heads of many people that Apple has now turned the old dynamic on its head. Apple’s ARM chips are years ahead of the commodity chips used by its competition, and are set to surpass even Intel’s x86 chips in terms of performance-per-watt. (Worth keeping in mind: performance-per-watt was Steve Jobs’s primary justification for the switch from PowerPC to Intel when the transition was announced at WWDC 2005.)

Interesting tidbit toward the end of Cheney’s piece:

It’s also known in inner circles that Apple has embarked on design of radio interface (RF) chips that traditionally were off limits to all but the most advanced chip makers like Qualcomm. These chips rival CPUs in complexity. Apple is now designing these to spec and will be putting its own radios into future mobile devices. This has physical layer impacts on bandwidth, connectivity, latency and user experience — all critical for autonomous vehicles.

Bluetooth sucks. In my opinion it’s the single-biggest problem with Apple Watch. Would be interesting if Apple created its own better-than-Bluetooth wireless protocol. Proprietary, of course.

Update: We should clarify one point from Cheney’s headline — Apple’s lead is formidable, not insurmountable. Nothing in tech is insurmountable.

Behind the Scenes on the Design of Apple’s New Trackpads, Keyboards, and iMacs  

Steven Levy scores another scoop for Medium’s Backchannel:

The input device, dubbed the Magic Mouse 2, would look to users exactly like the previous model. But on the inside and underneath, everything would be different, mainly because Apple was switching to a rechargeable lithium battery instead of the previous replaceable alkaline ones.

Late in the process, everything seemed to be going fine. The internal lithium battery was custom-engineered to fit the cavity. The redesigned antenna — necessary to deal with the potential interference from an internal battery — was working well.

But one thing was totally unacceptable.

The mouse didn’t sound right.

That’s what Apple engineering leaders Kate Bergeron and John Ternus told me recently, when I became the first reporter to venture into the Input Design Lab.

Great read. Update: This bit from Phil Schiller explains Apple’s entire product line, including why they keep making devices ever thinner:

Schiller, in fact, has a grand philosophical theory of the Apple product line that puts all products on a continuum. Ideally, you should be using the smallest possible gadget to do as much as possible before going to the next largest gizmo in line.

“They are all computers,” he says. “Each one is offering computers something unique and each is made with a simple form that is pretty eternal. The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often. The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that. The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook. Like, Why do I need a notebook? I can add a keyboard! I can do all these things! The job of the notebook is to make it so you never need a desktop, right? It’s been doing this for a decade. So that leaves the poor desktop at the end of the line, What’s its job?”

Android Security a ‘Market for Lemons’ That Leaves 87 Percent Vulnerable 

Liam Tung, reporting for ZDNet:

Consumers, regulators, and corporate buyers face a common problem when assessing Android smartphones, in that no one knows which vendor will supply patches after Google develops fixes for Android security bugs.

“The difficulty is that the market for Android security today is like the market for lemons,” Cambridge researchers Daniel Thomas, Alastair Beresford, and Andrew Rice note in a new paper.

“There is information asymmetry between the manufacturer, who knows whether the device is currently secure and will receive security updates, and the customer, who does not.”

Their analysis of data collected from over 20,000 Android devices with the Device Analyzer app installed found that 87 percent of Android devices were vulnerable to at least one of 11 bugs in the public domain in the past five years, including the recently discovered TowelRoot issue, which Cyanogen fixed last year, and FakeID.

Looks like March and April 2013 were the high-water mark for Android security.

iMac: Then and Now 

Fun comparison from Apple, pitting a 1998 iMac against today’s newest.

Playboy to Drop Nude Photos 

Ravi Somaiya, reporting for the NYT:

Last month, Cory Jones, a top editor at Playboy, went to see its founder Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion.

In a wood-paneled dining room, with Picasso and de Kooning prints on the walls, Mr. Jones nervously presented a radical suggestion: the magazine, a leader of the revolution that helped take sex in America from furtive to ubiquitous, should stop publishing images of naked women.

Mr. Hefner, now 89, but still listed as editor in chief, agreed. As part of a redesign that will be unveiled next March, the print edition of Playboy will still feature women in provocative poses. But they will no longer be fully nude.

Insert joke here about reading Playboy for the articles.

Playboy’s heyday was before my time, but at its height, it had remarkable reach:

Playboy’s circulation has dropped from 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 now, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Many of the magazines that followed it have disappeared. Though detailed figures are not kept for adult magazines, many of those that remain exist in severely diminished form, available mostly in specialist stores. Penthouse, perhaps the most famous Playboy competitor, responded to the threat from digital pornography by turning even more explicit. It never recovered.

Compare a circulation of 5.6 million in 1975 to this list of top U.S. magazine circulations from 2013.

Apple E-Book Antitrust Monitoring May End 

Pamela A. Maclean, reporting for Bloomberg:

The U.S. Justice Department said it’s satisfied Apple Inc. put in place reforms to comply with antitrust laws even though the company fought with a monitor appointed to oversee its sale of electronic books.

The government on Monday recommended that the monitoring not be extended.

A reminder that the e-book market share leader still has 80 percent share.

Rewriting Jack Dorsey’s ‘Jargon-Free’ Firing Memo 

Gideon Lichfield, writing for Quartz, disagrees that Dorsey’s memo announcing layoffs is “jargon-free”, and offers his own revision:

For its genre, Dorsey’s memo is indeed admirably brief and to the point. But it’s still riddled with jargon. Why is it so hard for executives to write in a truly straightforward manner? Here is Dorsey’s memo, with our suggested cuts in strikethrough and additions in bold.

A few of these were a little euphemistic, but in the annals of translating from corporate-talk to plain English, this is pretty tame. Dorsey’s opening sentence is a clunker — “We are moving forward with a restructuring of our workforce so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow” — but after that, I think it’s pretty clear.

Twitter Laying Off Over 300 Employees, 8 Percent of Staff 

Kurt Wagner, writing for Recode:

Twitter plans to lay off as much as 336 people, or 8 percent of its staff, as part of an internal restructuring plan, according to a filing submitted with the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday morning. […]

“Product and Engineering are going to make the most significant structural changes to reflect our plan ahead,” CEO Jack Dorsey said in a letter Tuesday morning. “We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce. And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel.”

They’ve also got a copy of Jack Dorsey’s company-wide memo announcing this. That’s a tough memo to write, but Dorsey does a good job of being honest and humane. Count me as a bull on Twitter.

Why the Words for ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages 

John McWhorter, writing for The Atlantic:

Is there anything inherently “doggy” about the word “dog”? Obviously not — to the French, a dog is a chien, to Russians a sobaka, to Mandarin Chinese-speakers a gǒu. These words have nothing in common, and none seem any more connected to the canine essence than any other. One runs up against that wall with pretty much any word.

Except some. The word for “mother” seems often either to be mama or have a nasal sound similar to m, like nana. The word for “father” seems often either to be papa or have a sound similar to p, like b, in it — such that you get something like baba. The word for “dad” may also have either d or t, which is a variation on saying d, just as p is on b. People say mama or nana, and then papa, baba, dada, or tata, worldwide.

Update: T-Rex explains.