Linked List: October 17, 2017

Tuesday, 17 October 2017

Dieter Bohn’s Google Pixel 2 Review 

Dieter Bohn, reviewing the new Pixel phones for The Verge:

Without fail, every person who has picked up the Pixel 2 XL has said virtually the same thing: “It feels like it’s made out of plastic.” I said it myself when I first held it. Of course, neither the Pixel 2 nor the Pixel 2 XL are made out of plastic. They’re made out of Gorilla Glass and aluminum, just like every other high-end phone these days.

But Google coated all that aluminum with a textured finish that hides most of the antenna lines and also makes the phones easier to grip. Google took what could have been a visually impressive design and covered it up in the name of ergonomics. It literally made a metal phone feel like a plastic one. It chose function over form.

Interesting design decision. Apple has moved from aluminum to glass (and last year a glassy-feeling coating on the jet black iPhones). Samsung has moved to glass. Part of this is that most top-tier phones this year support inductive charging (which doesn’t work through aluminum), but even here with the Pixels, they’ve moved away from feeling like aluminum.

On the display colors:

The screen, especially on the 2 XL, has been polarizing. Google opted to tune the display to sRGB (the Galaxy S8, by comparison, offers four gamut options), so it looks a little more like the iPhone’s screen. But more than that, on the 2 XL the colors look muted in a way that many Android users I’ve shown it to found distasteful (even with the “vivid colors” setting turned on). I think many Android phones, especially from Samsung, are so vivid as to be phantasmagoric, so Google’s choice was to make this more “naturalistic.”

My take ever since last year (I bought a Pixel 1) is that the Pixels are targeting people whose taste runs toward the iPhone hardware-wise, but who prefer Android over iOS. Actually, not Android over iOS, but the Google ecosystem over Apple’s. They’re iPhones for Google people. I find Samsung displays to be technically impressive but downright garish in terms of saturation.

Behind the Google Pixel 2 Camera Technology 

Stephen Shankland, writing for CNet on the ways “computational photography” improve the cameras in the new Google Pixel phones:

Some of Google’s investment in camera technology takes the form of AI, which pervades just about everything Google does these days. The company won’t disclose all the areas the Pixel 2 camera uses machine learning and “neural network” technology that works something like human brains, but it’s at least used in setting photo exposure and portrait-mode focus.

Neural networks do their learning via lots of real-world data. A neural net that sees enough photographs labeled with “cat” or “bicycle” eventually learns to identify those objects, for example, even though the inner workings of the process aren’t the if-this-then-that sorts of algorithms humans can follow.

“It bothered me that I didn’t know what was inside the neural network,” said Levoy, who initially was a machine-learning skeptic. “I knew the algorithms to do things the old way. I’ve been beat down so completely and consistently by the success of machine learning” that now he’s a convert.

‘A Soulless Coward’ 

San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich:

This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others. This has of course been a common practice of his, but to do it in this manner — and to lie about how previous presidents responded to the deaths of soldiers — is as low as it gets. We have a pathological liar in the White House, unfit intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically to hold this office, and the whole world knows it, especially those around him every day.

The NFL is a decidedly conservative sports league — certainly in the lowercase-c literal sense of the word, and I would argue in the political sense of the word too. The NBA, not so much. NBA players could take this kneeling-during-the-anthem issue with Trump to the next level.

(My two cents on the kneeling issue: Kneeling is not disrespectful. In fact, kneeling is universally seen as a deep sign of respect, everywhere from church services to Game of Thrones. When Colin Kaepernick began his silent protests during the national anthem, he did so by remaining seated on the bench. I can see the argument that sitting is disrespectful. I’m not saying Kaepernick should have been punished or vilified for sitting. I’m just saying that if you want to base your argument on “respect” for the flag and national anthem, if players are sitting on the bench, you have a case. But not kneeling. Kneeling is respectful — that’s why Kaepernick and his 49er teammates switched to it. Anyone objecting to players kneeling during the anthem is, no matter what they say, arguing about something other than “respect” for the flag and anthem. My take is that they’re objecting to a lack of compliance and obedience, a refusal to just let the matter fade away.)

‘Maybe It’s a Piece of Dust’ 

Casey Johnston, writing for The Outline:

I was in the Grand Central Station Apple Store for a third time in a year, watching a progress bar slowly creep across my computer’s black screen as my Genius multi-tasked helping another customer with her iPad. My computer was getting its third diagnostic test in 45 minutes. The problem was not that its logic board was failing, that its battery was dying, or that its camera didn’t respond. There were no mysteriously faulty inner workings. It was the spacebar. It was broken. And not even physically broken — it still moved and acted normally. But every time I pressed it once, it spaced twice.

“Maybe it’s a piece of dust,” the Genius had offered. The previous times I’d been to the Apple Store for the same computer with the same problem — a misbehaving keyboard — Geniuses had said to me these exact same nonchalant words, and I had been stunned into silence, the first time because it seemed so improbable to blame such a core problem on such a small thing, and the second time because I couldn’t believe the first time I was hearing this line that it was not a fluke. But this time, the third time, I was ready. “Hold on,” I said. “If a single piece of dust lays the whole computer out, don’t you think that’s kind of a problem?”

The reliability of the new MacBook/Pro keyboards seems like a huge problem. A piece of fucking dust? Say what you want about the feel (and sound) of these new keyboards, the one thing that must be true for any good keyboard is that it has to be reliable. Like totally reliable. So reliable that it’s confusing when something does go wrong. That’s how Apple laptop keyboards have always been, dating back to the earliest days of the PowerBooks. There’ve been some I didn’t enjoy — the squishy-feeling iBook G3 keyboard comes to mind — but they’ve always been reliable.

I find these keyboards — specifically, the tales of woe about keys getting stuck or ceasing to work properly — a deeply worrisome sign about Apple’s priorities today.