Linked List: August 1, 2017

Tuesday, 1 August 2017

iPhone D22’s Nickname May Have Been ‘Ferrari’ 

AppleInsider, back in December 2016:

Surfaced by a Sina Weibo user known for leaking information from Apple’s East Asian supply chain, the supposed documentation suggests Apple plans to market three iPhone models designated D20, D21 and D22 in 2017, reports Chinese blog cnBeta. Apple’s iPhone 7 and 7 Plus were codenamed D10 and — confusingly — D20 during development, the report said.

A three-model lineup jibes with rumors that Apple intends to launch two upgraded iPhone 7 models, likely branded “iPhone 7s” and “iPhone 7s Plus,” alongside a high-end version stuffed with exotic technology. This top-tier model, expected to boast a glass sandwich design, borderless OLED display, “invisible” home button, wireless charging and more, carries the internal codename “Ferrari,” according to today’s leaks.

This is the first reference to D22 that I’ve been able to find, and thanks to Apple’s premature release of an iOS 11.0.2 image, we now know D22 is the code name for the upcoming new high-end iPhone I’ve been referring to as “iPhone Pro”.

I’m nearly certain cnBeta was wrong about D20. Apple would never re-use a code name. It defeats the whole point of a code name. The iPhone 7 was D10 and iPhone 7 Plus was D11. You can find those code names in the shipping versions of iOS 10.

I’m pretty sure D20 is the new 4.7-inch iPhone, and D21 the Plus-sized 5.5-inch model. The obvious product names for these devices would be 7S and 7S Plus, respectively. D10/D11 last year, D20/D21 this year — with D22 as the new cherry on top. That’s how Apple code names products.

More interesting to me is the nickname “Ferrari”. Sounds like a good nickname for a sleek device that costs more, doesn’t it?

Botched Release of Beta HomePod OS Reveals Details of New 2017 iPhones and HomePod 

Jason Snell, collecting a story revealed in a series of tweets over the weekend:

Nobody digs into Apple software releases like Steve Troughton-Smith. And this is a big one. Apparently Apple released a firmware download for the HomePod (not due until the end of the year!) on its servers, and inside that firmware there’s information about future iPhone hardware and support for an infrared face unlock feature code-named Pearl ID.

Among the details revealed:

How in the world does something like this happen? My understanding is that Apple is (or at least was) on the cusp of a widespread deployment of prototype HomePods to employees. Someone prepared an over-the-air software update and because it was intended to be distributed only to Apple employees, the OS was compiled without all the usual flags set to omit code that pertains to unreleased hardware. (Kind of makes sense, insofar as HomePod itself is unreleased hardware.) Building the OS without those flags set may not have been a mistake. But distributing it via a world-readable server was.

Apple’s Third Quarter Results 

Apple:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2017 third quarter ended July 1, 2017. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $45.4 billion and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.67. These results compare to revenue of $42.4 billion and earnings per diluted share of $1.42 in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 61 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

When you look at the data, the most striking number is that iPad sales were up 15 percent year-over-year. That’s the first time that’s happened in a few years. But iPad revenue was only up about 2 percent. That suggests to me, strongly, that this sales bump was driven strongly by the new 9.7-inch iPad that starts at $329.

See also: Jason Snell’s cornucopia of graphs visualizing Apple’s results.

Businessweek Profiles Stripe Co-Founders Patrick and John Collison 

Ashlee Vance, writing for Bloomberg Businessweek:

One way to justify the number: Stripe’s new partnership with Amazon.com Inc., the largest and most sought-after customer on the internet. Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Neither company will address the scope of the deal — which was only revealed by Stripe’s addition of Amazon’s logo to its website — but it could help Stripe greatly increase its transaction volume. (Amazon had no comment.)

Seven years in, however, Stripe’s mission is less to send more books, vacuums, and grooming kits into the world than to “increase the GDP of the internet,” Patrick says. To do this, the company is beginning to move beyond payments by writing software that helps companies retool the way they incorporate, pay workers, and detect fraud. It’s part of an ambitious bid to revamp how online business has been conducted for 20 years and to give anyone with a bright idea a chance to compete. “We think giving two people in a garage the same infrastructure as a 100,000-person corporation — the aggregate effects of that will be really good,” Patrick says.

The key to Stripe’s success was their laser-like focus on developers. They made Stripe the easiest way to add payments to any system, and they have a great reputation for security and reliability.

Senator Jeff Flake: ‘My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump’ 

Senator Jeff Flake, Republican from Arizona:

Michael Gerson, a conservative columnist and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote, four months into the new presidency, “The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,” and conservative institutions “with the blessings of a president … have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion.”

For a conservative, that’s an awfully bitter pill to swallow. So as I layered in my defense mechanisms, I even found myself saying things like, “If I took the time to respond to every presidential tweet, there would be little time for anything else.” Given the volume and velocity of tweets from both the Trump campaign and then the White House, this was certainly true. But it was also a monumental dodge. It would be like Noah saying, “If I spent all my time obsessing about the coming flood, there would be little time for anything else.” At a certain point, if one is being honest, the flood becomes the thing that is most worthy of attention. At a certain point, it might be time to build an ark.

Under our Constitution, there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos. As the first branch of government (Article I), the Congress was designed expressly to assert itself at just such moments.

Flake is a sitting senator in Trump’s own party.

XKCD: Wi-Fi vs. Cellular 

I hadn’t really given this any thought, but now that I’ve seen this comic, I realize this is very much true for me as well. The reliability of Wi-Fi dropped beneath that of cellular a few years ago.