Linked List: November 2, 2017

Thursday, 2 November 2017

Daring Fireball Display Ads for November ★

You see those ads in the sidebar here on Daring Fireball? I’ve got a few openings for November. If you’ve got a product or service you want to promote to the DF audience, get in touch via the email link on this page.

Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results ★

There’s only one week of iPhone 8 sales in these results, but the average selling price for iPhone was effectively unchanged from the year-ago quarter, and total unit sales were slightly up. So much for those reports that the year-old iPhone 7 was outselling the iPhone 8. iPad and Mac unit sales are both up about 10 percent year-over-year.

Guidance for next quarter is insane: “revenue between $84 billion and $87 billion”. Last year for the holiday quarter Apple reported $78.4 billion in revenue, which was a record for the company. Even the low end of Apple’s guidance would shatter that record.

Christina Bonnington on Apple’s iPhone X Strategy ★

Another very astute take on Apple’s iPhone X marketing strategy, this one by Christina Bonnington for Slate:

If you’re reading an iPhone review on The Verge, or Engadget, or Wired, chances are you aren’t hemming and hawing about whether you want to buy the new device. Readers of those sites are already passionate about technology, have strong opinions about it, and often have the money to buy what they want. They’re also largely older and male. (As of 2017, the Wired audience was 57% male, with an average age of 42.) Apple doesn’t need to market as aggressively to this audience, which will seek out information about its products regardless.

Who Apple does want to market to: women and teens. According to 2015 data from Slice Analytics, older men spend the most on Apple products, while women aged 25 to 34 spend the least. Men of every age category (18-plus) outspent women of the same age range, and buyers tended to spend more money on Apple products as they got older. On top of that, women reportedly account for 70 to 85 percent of all consumer purchases and, according to Nielsen Consumer, have a buying power worth $5 to $15 trillion annually.

What all this means: Apple needs to focus its marketing efforts on millennials, teens, and wallet-controlling female buyers if it wants to expand its reach in the U.S., where Android controls 65 percent of the market.

Some Pixel 2 XL Units Are Shipping Without an Operating System ★

That’s one way to mitigate the complaints about the display.

Matt Alexander on Apple’s PR Strategy for iPhone X ★

Great piece by Matt Alexander, analyzing Apple’s new PR strategy for iPhone X:

How would Apple go about accomplishing these goals?

Simply put, they’d create a crashing wave, of sorts, of press around the product, which would enable them to control and manipulate consumer perception of the news, regardless of how more technical reviewers may feel.

Lesson learned from the Apple Watch Series 3 launch, the tech press created a huge amount of uproar about the device being unable to maintain an LTE connection. Although this was explained within hours of those reviews being published, it was already too late for the average consumer.

I think Alexander nailed Apple’s thinking on this. I do think Apple felt burned by the fact that day one coverage of Apple Watch Series 3 was dominated by the Wi-Fi hotspot bug encountered by The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern and The Verge’s Lauren Goode that seemingly rendered cellular networking — the product’s signature feature! — inoperative. The news that it was just a simple bug and would soon be fixed (which turned out to be true) didn’t spread nearly as widely.

In short, Apple wants control over the narrative for its products, and in-depth reviews are mostly out of their control.

They can’t have it both ways though. Apple yesterday posted “iPhone X: What Reviewers Are Saying” to their Newsroom blog, but most of the quotes were from “reviews” which were written by people who’d only spent a few hours with the phone.

More Face ID FUD, This Time From Reuters ★

Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters under the headline “App Developer Access to iPhone X Face Data Spooks Some Privacy Experts”:

Apple Inc won accolades from privacy experts in September for assuring that facial data used to unlock its new iPhone X would be securely stored on the phone itself.

But Apple’s privacy promises do not extend to the thousands of app developers who will gain access to facial data in order to build entertainment features for iPhone X customers, such as pinning a three-dimensional mask to their face for a selfie or letting a video game character mirror the player’s real-world facial expressions.

Apple allows developers to take certain facial data off the phone as long as they agree to seek customer permission and not sell the data to third parties, among other terms in a contract seen by Reuters.

This is dangerously misleading FUD. I say “dangerous” because this is the sort of story that could lead people to not set up Face ID, leaving their iPhones less secure and less useful.

There is no way, opt-in or otherwise, for third-party apps to access Face ID data. Face ID data is stored on the iPhone X’s secure enclave — even the OS itself can’t read it.

What third-party apps do have access to, if granted permission, is the front-facing camera with the TrueDepth sensor. That’s it. Apps have access to a front-facing camera that is better than previous front-facing cameras because it has 3D depth mapping. An app (like Snapchat or Instagram) can use this to implement augmented reality features like putting a mask or fake mustache on your face, but that has nothing to do with Face ID. I don’t think this is any more privacy invasive than what these apps are already doing with your iPhone camera — it’s just more accurate spatially for AR effects.

‘Inside the Great Poop Emoji Feud’ ★

Charlie Warzel, reporting for BuzzFeed:

The debate appears to be between some of Unicode’s most prolific contributors and typographers (Unicode was initially established to develop standards for translating alphabets into code that can be read across all computers and operating systems), and those in the consortium who focus primarily on the evolution of emojis. The two chief critics — Michael Everson and Andrew West, both typographers — say that the emoji proposal process has become too commercial and frivolous, thereby cheapening the Unicode Consortium’s long body of work.

Their argument centers around “Frowning Pile Of Poo,” one of the emojis under consideration for the June 2018 class. In an Oct. 22 memo to the Unicode Technical Committee, Everson tore into the committee over the submission calling it “damaging … to the Unicode standard.”

“Organic waste isn’t cute,” Everson wrote, aghast that the technical committee would even deign to consider additional excremoji. “It is bad enough that the [Emoji Subcommittee] came up with it, but it beggars belief that the [Unicode Technical Committee] actually approved it,” he wrote. Everson continued:

“The idea that our 5 committees would sanction further cute graphic characters based on this should embarrass absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence. Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC? Will we have to encode a neutral FACELESS PILE OF POO?”

I’m all for taking most of the Unicode Consortium’s work deliberately and seriously, but emoji are inherently frivolous. The frivolity of emoji is why they’re so sensationally popular.

Also, Simon Willison:

I love how the fact that unicode chars are referred to by their name IN CAPS makes everyone seem even more angry.

Sports Illustrated’s 2014 Cover Story Predicting the Astros as 2017 World Series Champs ★

Amazingly prescient. They even chose George Springer for the photo — who hit five home runs in the World Series to run away with the MVP. Words I never expected to type: the Houston Astros are indisputably the best team in baseball.