Linked List: June 30, 2017

Friday, 30 June 2017

The WSJ: ‘How the iPhone Was Born: Inside Stories of Missteps and Triumphs’ 

Ten-minute video from The Wall Street Journal with new interviews from Scott Forstall, Greg Christie, and Tony Fadell on the creation of the original iPhone. Great stuff.

Fraser Speirs: ‘Can a Laptop Replace Your iPad?’ 

Fraser Speirs, back in 2015:

Firstly, consider the hardware. The huge issue with the MacBook Pro is its form factor. The fact that the keyboard and screen are limited to being held in an L-shaped configuration seriously limits its flexibility. It is basically impossible to use a MacBook pro while standing up and downright dangerous to use when walking around. Your computing is limited to times when you are able to find somewhere to sit down.

Brilliant, and particularly apt this week. As I pointed out the first time I linked to it, the original title for the piece says it all: “If Journalists Reviewed Macs Like iPads”.

From the DF Archive: iPhone First Impressions 

My thoughts and first impressions of the original iPhone from 10 years ago:

Real-time dragging is such a priority that if the iPhone can’t keep up and render what you’re dragging in real-time, it won’t even try, and you get a checkerboard pattern reminiscent of a transparent Photoshop layer until it catches up (typically, an instant later). I.e. iPhone prioritizes drag animation over the rendering of the contents; feel over appearance.

This was a profound change in priorities from the Mac. In the early years of Mac OS X, Mac hardware wasn’t powerful enough to render the Aqua user interface. Scrolling was slow, and when you resized windows, it felt really slow, because the interface was trying to keep up. The OS tried its best to render everything in real-time even if it couldn’t.

The original iPhone likewise wasn’t powerful enough to render the user interface, notably while scrolling long web pages. Rather than try to keep up, the iPhone would just show that checkboard, which could scroll as fast as your fingers could swipe. Prioritizing feeling fast over visual fidelity made the experience better. One of many brilliant decisions by the original iPhone team, and I suspect a lesson learned from Mac OS X’s debut half a decade earlier.

I’ve always had strong feelings on the design of note-taking apps:

Notes: The weakest app on the iPhone. Cosmetically, it’s a train wreck. The entire iPhone UI is set in one typeface — Helvetica — and it’s gorgeous. But Notes, in a lame attempt to be “friendly”, displays a UI that looks like a pad of yellow legal paper, and uses the handwriting-esque Marker Felt as the font for note text. This is not adjustable. Marker Felt is silly, ugly, and worst of all, hard to read.

How Lightspeed Venture Partners Responded to Partner Justin Caldbeck’s Alleged Behavior 

Dan Primack, reporting for Axios:

When Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake told Lightspeed Venture Partners, an early investor in her company, that (then) Lightspeed partner Justin Caldbeck had sexually harassed her, the firm asked her to sign a non-disparagement agreement. Not signing, a source suggests, could have endangered her entire company’s future. So she signed, and remained silent about her experience.

Why it matters: Lightspeed today tweeted that it regrets not taking “stronger action” when it learned of Caldbeck’s alleged behavior. Lake signed the non-disparagement clause while Stitch Fix was trying to raise money — which it eventually did in a round led by top-tier VC firm Benchmark. Lightspeed could have blocked that investment.

Let me get this straight: Lightspeed now says “we regret we did not take stronger action”, but at the time, the only action they did take was to encourage Caldbeck’s accuser to sign a legal agreement to keep her mouth shut?

Translation: We regret that this has come to light.

Ends, Means, and Antitrust 

Ben Thompson on the European Commission’s €2.42 billion fine levied on Google for anti-competitive behavior:

The United States and European Union have, at least since the Reagan Administration, differed on this point: the U.S. is primarily concerned with consumer welfare, and the primary proxy is price. In other words, as long as prices do not increase — or even better, decrease — there is, by definition, no illegal behavior.

The European Commission, on the other hand, is explicitly focused on competition: monopolistic behavior is presumed to be illegal if it restricts competitors which, in the theoretical long run, hurts consumers by restricting innovation.

This is quite obviously true — best exemplified by, as Thompson himself writes, “the absurdity of the U.S. Justice Department successfully suing Apple for building a competitor to Amazon, the actual e-book monopolist.” That decision was entirely about the retail price of e-books.

But on the surface doesn’t this feel backwards? Shouldn’t the U.S. — the country where free-market capitalism is effectively a religion — be the country that values competition above all else? With genuine competition, fair prices should naturally result. Competition is the cause, fair prices are the effect. With a monopolist like Amazon that strategically keeps prices artificially low (Amazon sold bestselling e-books for $9.99 at a loss), not only does competition not follow as a result, the predatory pricing is the cause and lack of competition is the effect.

U.S. antitrust policy is blinded by the assumption that a monopolist’s only goal is to raise prices.

Glenn Fleishman on HEVC and HEIF 

Glenn Fleishman, writing for TidBITS:

If you haven’t already experienced abbreviation overload, Apple has added two more to your plate: HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) and HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format — yes, it’s short one F). These two new formats will be used by iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra when Apple releases them later this year.

While you may never have heard of HEVC or HEIF before, both are attempts to solve a set of problems related to video and still images. As people take photos and shoot video at increasingly higher resolutions and better quality, storage and bandwidth start to become limitations. Even in this day of ever-cheaper and ever-faster everything, consuming less storage space and requiring less bandwidth when syncing or streaming still has many positive aspects.

Motherboard: ‘The Life, Death, and Legacy of iPhone Jailbreaking’ 

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Brian Merchant, writing for Motherboard:

Ten years after the iPhone hit the sleek tables of Apple Stores worldwide, and the first-ever jailbreak, that Wild West is gone. There’s now a professionalized, multi-million dollar industry of iPhone security research. It’s a world where jailbreaking itself — at least jailbreaking as we’ve come to know it — might be over.