Linked List: April 2017

Saturday, 29 April 2017

My thanks to Outlier for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Outlier makes radical quality clothing, with obsessively sourced raw materials. Their clothes are designed for performance, durability, and movement. I’m wearing their Ultrafine Merino T-shirt and Megafine Merino socks as I type this, and they are, simply, excellent.

I just got a pair of their shorts, too, and the first thing I checked out were the pockets. The pockets on most shorts I’ve owned are shitty. There’s no other way to say it. The pockets on Outlier shorts are exquisite. This is a company that pays attention to the details — all of the details.

What other company sells a bomber jacket with a description that begins “They say ‘don’t fuck with a classic’”? No one. Check them out. I’m buying a slew of their stuff this week.

HAL, Not Threepio ★

Me, a few days ago:

Once you start thinking about the implications of an AI-driven device that can both see and hear you, it becomes obvious just how primitive these devices still are. I want a C–3PO, not a talking camera fixed on my dresser that tells me if my socks and shirt match.

Now that I think about it, what I really want is HAL. Think about it: HAL 9000 is the platonic ideal of these voice-driven assistants. He understands you perfectly, every time; he answers immediately; he can see not just hear; and he’s available throughout your home/spaceship. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark were amazingly prescient about where AI and human-computer interfaces were heading. They were just too optimistic about how soon we’d get there.

Man Who Owns Car Company Thinks We Should Build Public Transit System for Cars ★

Darrell Etherington, writing for TechCrunch on Elon Musk’s (admittedly cleverly named) Boring Company:

Just what does Elon Musk’s Boring Company want to accomplish? This might be our clearest picture yet — a video shown during Musk’s TEDTalk from Friday morning, which includes a rendering of a future underground transit network where cars travel on crisscrossing layers of tunnels that include sleds shuttling vehicles around on rails at around 130 mph.

This is a stupid idea, and I can’t believe anyone is taking it seriously. Why in the world would any city in the world invest in a public transit system for cars? I’m all for major investments in public transit infrastructure, but public transit is and should be for people, not for fucking cars.

EPA Website Removes Climate Science Site From Public View After Two Decades ★

Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin, reporting for The Washington Post:

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday evening that its website would be “undergoing changes” to better represent the new direction the agency is taking, triggering the removal of several agency websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information. [...]

The staffer described the process of reviewing the site as “a work in progress, but we can’t have information which contradicts the actions we have taken in the last two months,” adding that Pruitt’s aides had “found a number of instances of that so far” while surveying the site.

Yet the website overhaul appears to include not only policy-related changes but also scrutiny of a scientific Web page that has existed for nearly two decades, and that explained what climate change is and how it worked.

Translation: “We can’t let scientific facts get in the way of our policies.”

The Bush administration wasn’t exactly known as a friend to environmental concerns, but even they didn’t take down these pages of scientific facts and data. The Trump kakistocracy is something else entirely.

Thieves Leak First 10 ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 5 Episodes After Netflix Refuses to Pay Ransom ★

Todd Spangler, reporting for Variety:

An anonymous hacker has carried through on a threat to release “Orange Is the New Black” season five episodes online — after Netflix allegedly failed to respond to the cybercriminal’s shakedown demands. [...]

The first 10 episodes of season 5 were apparently shared shortly before 6 a.m. ET Saturday, with the 10 files comprising a total of 11.46 gigabytes. [...]

According to “thedarkoverlord,” the hacker or hackers also have obtained unreleased shows from ABC, Fox, National Geographic and IFC. The content appears to have been stolen in an attack on post-production studio Larson Studios in late 2016, according to piracy-news site TorrentFreak. “Thedarkoverlord” explained in an online post that they obtained only the first 10 of the 13 episodes of “OITNB” season 5 because the cyberattack was carried out before the final three installments were available.

Here’s “Thedarkoverlord”’s post announcing the release of the episodes.

I got a tour of MLB Advanced Media’s facilities in New York last year. We weren’t allowed anywhere near the area where HBO shows were handled. That area was like the count room in a casino — the securest of secure areas. You know how you don’t crack jokes about bombs while you’re in the security line at an airport? It’s like that with leaked episodes of Game of Thrones at MLB Advanced Media — no joking matter.

I would not want to be Larson Studios.

George Takei: ‘Internment, America’s Great Mistake’ ★

George Takei, in an op-ed for The New York Times:

I was 5 years old at the beginning of our internment in Arkansas. I remember every school morning reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, my eyes upon the stars and stripes of the flag, but at the same time I could see from the window the barbed wire and the sentry towers where guards kept guns trained on us.

I was 7 years old when we were transferred to another camp for “disloyals.” My mother and father’s only crime was refusing, out of principle, to sign a loyalty pledge promulgated by the government. The authorities had already taken my parents’ home on Garnet Street in Los Angeles, their once thriving dry cleaning business, and finally their liberty. Now they wanted them to grovel; this was an indignity too far.

When I was a kid, I thought World War II was “a long time ago”. Now that I’m in my 40s, when I think about the fact that the Japanese internment happened just 30 years before I was born, it gives me pause. It wasn’t that long ago.

Apple Halts License Payments to Qualcomm in ‘All-Out War’ ★

Ian King, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. cut off billions of dollars in payments to Qualcomm Inc., turning a contract dispute into what one analyst called an “all-out war” that forced the chip supplier to slash forecasts given only days ago.

The world’s largest publicly-traded technology company and one of the main suppliers of components to the iPhone, its most important product, have traded accusations of lying, making threats and trying to create an illegal monopoly. The fight involves billions of dollars of technology licensing revenue that, if permanently cut off or reduced, would damage Qualcomm’s main source of profit and help bolster Apple’s margins.

Apple told Qualcomm it will stop paying licensing revenue to contract manufacturers of the iPhone, the mechanism by which it’s paid the chipmaker since the best-selling smartphone debuted in 2007, the San Diego, California-based company said in a statement. Qualcomm removed any assumption it will get those fees from its forecast for the current period. Apple doesn’t have a direct license with Qualcomm, unlike other phone makers.

Reminds me of that episode of Mad Men where Don Draper said to Duck Phillips, “I don’t have a contract.” This is some serious hardball — Qualcomm had to cut its revenue forecast for the next quarter by $500 million.

Friday, 28 April 2017

Transcript of Lisa Jackson’s Episode of The Talk Show ★

Full transcript of Lisa Jackson’s interview on The Talk Show last week. In case you missed it, it’s a great episode.

‘I Thought It Would Be Easier’ ★

Reuters reporters Stephen J. Adler, Jeff Mason, and Steve Holland:

President Donald Trump on Thursday reflected on his first 100 days in office with a wistful look at his life before the White House.

“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going,” Trump told Reuters in an interview. “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”

As with his admission two weeks ago that after just 10 minutes with President Xi Jinping of China, he realized he was completely ignorant of the complexity of Chinese-North Korean relations, what’s striking here isn’t that Trump was so ignorant that he thought being president of the United States would be easier than hosting a game show. It’s that he’s so militantly ignorant that he’s not embarrassed to admit this. He’s a laughingstock around the world.

More than five months after his victory and two days shy of the 100-day mark of his presidency, the election is still on Trump’s mind. Midway through a discussion about Chinese President Xi Jinping, the president paused to hand out copies of what he said were the latest figures from the 2016 electoral map.

“Here, you can take that, that’s the final map of the numbers,” the Republican president said from his desk in the Oval Office, handing out maps of the United States with areas he won marked in red. “It’s pretty good, right? The red is obviously us.”

He had copies for each of the three Reuters reporters in the room.

The election is old news to everyone but Trump, because it’s the only thing he can hold onto as any form of success. Again, the fact that he’s still obsessed with it is bad enough, but even worse is that he lacks the self-awareness to realize that perseverating on it in an interview with Reuters — with prepared printed material in triplicate — lays his pathological narcissism bare for the world to see.

Man Trump Named to Fix Mortgage Markets Figured in Infamous Financial Crisis Episode ★

Matt Taibbi, writing for Rolling Stone:

Of those bad actors, there is a subset of still-worse actors, who not only sold these toxic investments to institutional investors like pension funds and Fannie and Freddie, but helped get a generation of home borrowers — often minorities and the poor — into deadly mortgages that ended up wiping out their equity.

Phillips, who helped Fannie and Freddie into substantial losses and worked with predatory firms like New Century, belongs in this second category. As Beavis and Butthead would put it, Phillips comes from the “ass of the ass.”

Donald Trump, then, has essentially picked one of the last people on earth who should be allowed to help reshape the mortgage markets. This is like putting a guy who sold thousand-dollar magazine subscriptions to your grandmother on the telephone in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the A.A.R.P.

[Kakistocracy].

Was Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Really the 2nd Best ‘Wii Tennis’ Player in the World? ★

Jess Joho, investigating for Motherboard:

As the story goes, one night in 2010 or so, Kalanick was with friend and Uber investor Chris Sacca. Sacca’s dad requested a game of “Wii Tennis” and Kalanick allegedly blew them all away before revealing he was tied for 2nd best in the world.

The first problem here is that “Wii Tennis” is not a video game that exists. I reached out to several Uber representatives a few times for clarity on this but the company replied that, “we’re not commenting.” When we asked Nintendo of America for help in identifying this game, it said “We have nothing to announce on this topic.”

Based on this story’s many retellings (and the images used whenever it makes media rounds throughout the past couple of years), most people assume that they actually meant Wii Sports, released in 2006, which included a tennis mini-game. It was also an insanely popular game that sold over 82 million copies and was packed in with the Wii in North America, so it makes sense that Sacca’s dad had it. The problem here is that Wii Sports had no online play of any kind and therefore no leaderboard to keep track of the best players in the world.

“Second-best in the world” is such a funny thing to lie about.

But I have to point out: it’s Chris Sacca, not Kalanick, who looks like he’s full of shit in this telling. As far as I can tell, this wasn’t a story Kalanick used to pump himself up but rather a story Sacca used to pump Uber up by painting Kalanick as a superman. Sacca owns 4 percent of Uber.

Update: Kyle Orland has a terrific story at Ars Technica digging into this story.

Thursday, 27 April 2017

Sheldon Whitehouse on the Politics of Climate Change ★

Terrific 5-minute video from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island on the politics behind the Republican Party’s stonewalling on climate change. Watch it and pass it along.

(I’m surely the millionth person to make this observation, but how great would it be if he were elected president and we had a Whitehouse White House?)

Are Trump Voters Ruining America for All of Us? ★

Tom Nichols, in an op-ed for USA Today:

There is a serious danger to American democracy in all this. When voters choose ill-informed grudges and diffuse resentment over the public good, a republic becomes unsustainable. The temperance and prudent reasoning required of representative government gets pushed aside in favor of whatever ignorant idea has seized the public at that moment. The Washington Post recently changed its motto to “democracy dies in darkness,” a phrase that is not only pretentious but inaccurate. More likely, American democracy will die in dumbness.

Those of us who criticized Trump voters for their angry populism were often told during and after the election not to condescend to our fellow citizens, and to respect their choices. This is fair. In a democracy, every vote counts equally and the president won an impressive and legitimate electoral victory.

Even so, the unwillingness of so many of his supporters to hold him to even a minimal standard of accountability means that a certain amount of condescension from the rest of us is unavoidable.

If you say “I voted for Trump because I want to say ‘Fuck you’ to everyone — my life’s in the toilet and I’d like to see the world burn”, OK, I get it. I don’t like you, but you made the right choice in Trump and I can see why you’re happy so far. But if you’re pleased with Trump because you think he’s running an effective administration and is accomplishing the things he promised to accomplish, you’re as disconnected from reality as he is.

(Also, kudos to Nichols for the rare exception to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.)

Amazon Echo Look – A Camera for Your Dressing Room ★

There are a few fleeting shots of men in Amazon’s intro video for the Echo Look, but this is clearly envisioned as a product for women. I’m trying to think of another gadget whose advertising is so heavily skewed toward women, and I’m coming up blank.

Once you start thinking about the implications of an AI-driven device that can both see and hear you, it becomes obvious just how primitive these devices still are. I want a C-3PO, not a talking camera fixed on my dresser that tells me if my socks and shirt match.

Privacy-wise, this bit seems rather alarming:

Motherboard also asked if Echo Look photos, videos, and the data gleaned from them would be sold to third parties; the company did not address that question.

Apple can’t get into this category fast enough.

Update: I want HAL first.

Wednesday, 26 April 2017

‘Today at Apple’ ★

Apple:

Apple today announced plans to launch dozens of new educational sessions next month in all 495 Apple stores ranging in topics from photo and video to music, coding, art and design and more. The hands-on sessions, collectively called “Today at Apple,” will be led by highly-trained team members, and in select cities world-class artists, photographers and musicians, teaching sessions from basics and how-to lessons to professional-level programs.

I think Apple’s retail stores are one of the most overlooked / underestimated advantages in all of technology. They have spaces around the world where people can have interactions with real people, in real life. Not through a screen. Real life. Who else has that? I think taking that to the next level is what this “Today at Apple” program is all about.

Animated Bézier Curves ★

Very cool web page by Jason Davies that interactively shows how Bézier curves work.

(Via Gus Mueller.)

Tuesday, 25 April 2017

Google Rewrites Its Powerful Search Rankings to Bury Fake News ★

Mark Bergen, writing for Bloomberg:

The Alphabet Inc. company is making a rare, sweeping change to the algorithm behind its powerful search engine to demote misleading, false and offensive articles online. Google is also setting new rules encouraging its “raters” — the 10,000-plus staff that assess search results — to flag web pages that host hoaxes, conspiracy theories and what the company calls “low-quality” content.

The moves follow months after criticism of Google and Facebook Inc. for hosting misleading information, particular tied to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Google executives claimed the type of web pages categorized in this bucket are relatively small, which is a reason why the search giant hadn’t addressed the issue before.

“It was not a large fraction of queries — only about a quarter percent of our traffic — but they were important queries,” said Ben Gomes, vice president of engineering for Google.

Good for them. What Gomes said is exactly right — it may not be many queries, but they are important queries.

Monday, 24 April 2017

In Response to Guardian’s Irresponsible Reporting on WhatsApp ★

Speaking of The Guardian, it’s now the last week of April and they still haven’t issued a retraction of their grievously irresponsible story alleging a “backdoor” in WhatsApp from January. Zeynep Tufekci, in an open letter signed by dozens of security/cryptography experts:

Unfortunately, your story was the equivalent of putting “VACCINES KILL PEOPLE” in a blaring headline over a poorly contextualized piece. While it is true that in a few cases, vaccines kill people through rare and unfortunate side effects, they also save millions of lives.

You would have no problem understanding why “Vaccines Kill People” would be a problem headline for a story, especially given the context of anti-vaccination movements. But your series of stories on WhatsApp does the same disservice and perpetrates a similar public health threat against secure communications.

The behavior described in your article is not a backdoor in WhatsApp. This is the overwhelming consensus of the cryptography and security community. It is also the collective opinion of the cryptography professionals whose names appear below. The behavior you highlight is a measured tradeoff that poses a remote threat in return for real benefits that help keep users secure, as we will discuss in a moment. [...]

Since the publication of this story, we’ve observed and heard from worried activists, journalists and ordinary people who use WhatsApp, who tell us that people are switching to SMS and Facebook Messenger, among other options–many services that are strictly less secure than WhatsApp.

The Guardian has stretched this out for three months, so it looks like they think they can run out the clock on it. Shameful — this should be an everlasting hit to their credibility.

The Guardian Pulls Out of Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News, but Not Google’s AMP ★

Jessica Davies, reporting for Digiday:

A Guardian News and Media spokesperson confirmed the removal, and issued the following statement to Digiday: “We have run extensive trials on Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News to assess how they fit with our editorial and commercial objectives. Having evaluated these trials, we have decided to stop publishing in those formats on both platforms. Our primary objective is to bring audiences to the trusted environment of the Guardian to support building deeper relationships with our readers, and growing membership and contributions to fund our world-class journalism.”

But:

Meanwhile the Guardian’s use of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, the rival to Instant Articles, seems to be going strong. In March the Guardian presented at AMP Conf, a two-day conference hosted in New York, where it revealed that 60 percent of the Guardian’s Google-referred mobile traffic was coming via AMP.

Follow that link, though, and it doesn’t sound like The Guardian is getting much out of AMP:

AMP pages are 2 percent more likely to be clicked on and clickthrough rates on AMP pages to non-AMP pages is 8.6 percent higher than they are on regular mobile pages, according to Natalia Baltazar, a developer for the British newspaper, who presented at AMP Conf, a two-day conference hosted by Google taking place in New York City March 7-8.

Wikitribune: An ‘Evidence-Based’ News Site From Jimmy Wales ★

New ad-free news site from Jimmy Wales, with professional journalists and Wikipedia-style volunteers working side-by-side. Terrific idea, and there’s a great launch video by Sandwich Video and Kirby Ferguson that explains the concept well.

Here’s Why Juicero’s Press Is So Expensive ★

Ben Einstein has a nice tear-down of Juicero’s $399 juicer:

Our usual advice to hardware founders is to focus on getting a product to market to test the core assumptions on actual target customers, and then iterate. Instead, Juicero spent $120M over two years to build a complex supply chain and perfectly engineered product that is too expensive for their target demographic.

Imagine a world where Juicero raised only $10M and built a product subject to significant constraints. Maybe the Press wouldn’t be so perfectly engineered but it might have a fewer features and cost a fraction of the original $699. Or maybe with a more iterative approach, they would have quickly found that customers vary greatly in their juice consumption patterns, and would have chosen a per-pack pricing model rather than one-size-fits-all $35/week subscription. Suddenly Juicero is incredibly compelling as a product offering, at least to this consumer.

CleanEmail ★

If you’re looking for an alternative to Unroll.me, CleanEmail looks like a good choice:

Here at CleanEmail, we are committed to your security and privacy. In short: we don’t keep, sell, or analyze your data for the purposes beyond our public features. Read below for more details.

They don’t have to sell your personal email data because they charge an honest price for their service.

The Gentlemen’s Journal’s Ranking of Bond Cars ★

Not a bad list, but I would move the Toyota 2000GT from You Only Live Twice up to number 3, and I would have put the Aston Martin V8 from The Living Daylights on the list.

One for the Thumbs ★

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Siskel and Ebert had it right. The two critics were forced to provide star ratings for their newspapers, but when they created their own TV movie-reviews show, they famously boiled the whole thing down to thumbs up and thumbs down. And they were critics who reviewed hundreds of films a year! If it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for the rest of us — and for the algorithms fed by our sentiment.

👍

Apple Cuts Affiliate Commissions on Apps and In-App Purchases ★

John Voorhees, reporting for MacStories:

Today, Apple announced that it is reducing the commissions it pays on apps and In-App Purchases from 7% to 2.5% effective May 1st. The iTunes Affiliate Program pays a commission from Apple’s portion of the sale of apps and other media when a purchase is made with a link that contains the affiliate credentials of a member of the program. Anyone can join, but the Affiliate Program is used heavily by websites that cover media sold by Apple and app developers. [...]

With ad revenue in decline, affiliate commissions are one way that many websites that write about apps generate revenue, MacStories included. Many developers also use affiliate links in their apps and on their websites to supplement their app income. This change will put additional financial pressure on both groups, which is why it’s especially unfortunate that the changes are being made on just one week’s notice.

Everything about this strikes me as strange, including the mere one week notice and the severity of the cut. It’s not a small reduction — it’s effectively been cut by two thirds. Note too that Apple is only reducing the affiliate commission for apps and in-app purchases — movies, music, and books are all still at 7 percent.

I ask: Why? I can almost always see logic behind Apple’s decisions, even when I don’t agree with them. But not this one.

Update: I should add that I don’t have any skin in this decision, personally. I don’t use affiliate codes when linking to apps here at DF, and I’m no longer in Amazon’s affiliate program either. I think we did use affiliate codes at Q Branch to get a commission on links to Vesper, but that’s over now.

Sunday, 23 April 2017

‘Heartbreaking’ ★

Unroll.me CEO and founder Jojo Hedaya, in a blog post responding to the outcry after Mike Isaac of The New York Times revealed that the company does things like sell “anonymized” Lyft receipts to Lyft arch-rival Uber:

Our users are the heart of our company and service. So it was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service.

And while we try our best to be open about our business model, recent customer feedback tells me we weren’t explicit enough.

Give me a fucking break. They’re not “heartbroken” because their users are upset. They’re in damage-control mode because they were operating under the radar and now they’ve been revealed, very publicly, as the shitbags that they are. If you’ve signed up for Unroll.me, delete your account. They make money by selling your purchase receipts to the highest bidder. That’s their business.

Unsubstantiated, but from a post on Hacker News:

I worked for a company that nearly acquired unroll.me. At the time, which was over three years ago, they had kept a copy of every single email of yours that you sent or received while a part of their service. Those emails were kept in a series of poorly secured S3 buckets. A large part of Slice buying unroll.me was for access to those email archives. Specifically, they wanted to look for keyword trends and for receipts from online purchases.

Saturday, 22 April 2017

Fastly ★

My thanks to Fastly for once again sponsoring the DF RSS feed. Fastly’s content delivery network was built by developers for developers — they speed up sites and applications no matter where your customers are or which devices they use. Fastly integrates seamlessly with your existing stack and workflows, delivering content quickly and securely to your end users while giving you the real-time metrics you need to make better decisions. Fastly customers include open source projects like Python and Ruby, as well as major developer and consumer companies like GitHub, New Relic, and Airbnb.

They even have a special deal for Daring Fireball readers: test up to $50 of traffic free of charge.

Friday, 21 April 2017

The Talk Show: Apple VP Lisa Jackson ★

Special guest Lisa Jackson — Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives — joins the show for an Earth Day discussion of the state of Apple’s environmental efforts: climate change, renewable energy, responsible packaging, and Apple’s new goal to create a “closed-loop supply chain”, wherein the company’s products would be manufactured entirely from recycled materials.

Wednesday, 19 April 2017

A Software Developer’s Mac Pro ★

Justin Williams:

I can’t speak to what the other five types of users need, but I have a pretty good idea of what I’d want as an iOS developer who uses a Mac every day. Not that anyone in Cupertino is asking me, but if they did I’d say this is my dream Mac.

This sounds about right to me.

The New Mac Pro Needs to Be Versatile ★

Marco Arment, examining the wildly-varying needs of Mac Pro customers:

Or, to distill the requirements down to a single word:

Versatility.

Just as macOS’ versatility allows iOS to remain lightweight, the ability of the rest of the Mac lineup to be more aggressive, minimalist, and forward-looking depends on the Mac Pro to cover everyone whose needs don’t fit into them. The Mac Pro must be the catch-all at the high end: anytime someone says the iMac or MacBook Pro isn’t something enough for them, the solution should be the Mac Pro.

That link is to my Macworld column from 7 years ago, which reads like it was written today:

Here’s the short version of the “Mac is doomed” scenario: iOS is the future, Mac OS X is the past, and Apple is strongly inclined to abandon the past in the name of the future.

You can’t really argue with that, can you? But the premise that the end is near for the Mac presupposes quite a bit about the near-term future of iOS.

[...]

At typical companies, “legacy” technology is something you figure out how to carry forward. At Apple, legacy technology is something you figure out how to get rid of. The question isn’t whether iOS has a brighter future than the Mac. There is no doubt: it does. The question is whether the Mac has become “legacy.” Is the Mac slowing iOS down or in any way holding it back

Conservatives Hated an Uppity Negro Golfing President ★

Shaun King, in his column for The New York Daily News:

Imagine Michelle Obama demanded to live in a gold-plated penthouse in the middle of Manhattan, costs be damned, while President Obama lived in the White House alone. The outrage would be riot-level fierce. Now, conservatives no longer care.

$400 VC-Backed Juice Machine Is Completely Unnecessary ★

Ellen Huet and Olivia Zaleski, reporting for Bloomberg:

Doug Evans, the company’s founder, would compare himself with Steve Jobs in his pursuit of juicing perfection. He declared that his juice press wields four tons of force — “enough to lift two Teslas,” he said. Google’s venture capital arm and other backers poured about $120 million into the startup. Juicero sells the machine for $400, plus the cost of individual juice packs delivered weekly. Tech blogs have dubbed it a “Keurig for juice.”

But after the product hit the market, some investors were surprised to discover a much cheaper alternative: You can squeeze the Juicero bags with your bare hands. Two backers said the final device was bulkier than what was originally pitched and that they were puzzled to find that customers could achieve similar results without it. Bloomberg performed its own press test, pitting a Juicero machine against a reporter’s grip. The experiment found that squeezing the bag yields nearly the same amount of juice just as quickly — and in some cases, faster — than using the device.

Juicero declined to comment.

This is hilarious. Terrific video demonstration too.

But after the product’s introduction last year, at least two Juicero investors were taken aback after finding the packs could be squeezed by hand. They also said the machine was much bigger than what Evans had proposed.

This says as much about the investors as it does about the company.

Fox News Fires Bill O’Reilly ★

Gabriel Sherman, reporting for New York magazine this morning:

The Murdochs have decided Bill O’Reilly’s 21-year run at Fox News will come to an end. According to sources briefed on the discussions, network executives are preparing to announce O’Reilly’s departure before he returns from an Italian vacation on April 24. Now the big questions are how the exit will look and who will replace him.

Wednesday morning, according to sources, executives are holding emergency meetings to discuss how they can sever the relationship with the country’s highest-rated cable-news host without causing collateral damage to the network. The board of Fox News’ parent company, 21st Century Fox, is scheduled to meet on Thursday to discuss the matter.

Official statement from Fox News:

After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the Company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel.

What an ignominious end. His last episode was just 41 minutes long, because so many sponsors had pulled out, and he doesn’t even get to say goodbye to his audience.

The Talk Show: ‘Forget About Frodo and Sam’ ★

That’s right, another new episode of The Talk Show. Special guest MG Siegler returns to the show. Topics includes Virgin America’s sad fate as a subsidiary of Alaska Airlines, the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pros, “doing work” on an iPad Pro, Walt Mossberg, the absurd bloat of iOS apps, Clips, Netflix and Amazon’s spending on video, and more.

Brought to you by these fine sponsors:

Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code gruber for 10% off your first order.
Eero: Finally, Wi-Fi that works.
Fracture: Your photos, printed directly on glass. Great gift idea.

Video of Facebook Spaces in Action ★

I’m calling this an “emperor has no clothes” moment. This is a horror show. Disembodied torsos? Virtual selfie sticks? This looks like the way people would socialize in a post-apocalyptic scenario where everyone is quarantined in a bunker to shelter themselves from the zombie virus. It’s clunky and painfully awkward.

Who the hell wants to strap on a headset to have a video call with the disembodied Wii-like avatars of their friends when they can just hold up their phones and have a regular video call where they can see their actual friends? This is stupid.

Tuesday, 18 April 2017

Internet Archive Now Has a Browser-Based Emulator of Classic Mac Hardware ★

Jason Scott:

After offering in-browser emulation of console games, arcade machines, and a range of other home computers, the Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984.

This is amazing. HyperCard! ResEdit! Quit commands in their rightful place in the File menu!

One thing that struck me clicking around for a few minutes: the original Mac team got it wrong with their decision to only keep a menu open while holding down the mouse button. Years later, Apple switched to allowing both click-and-hold and just plain click-and-release to navigate menus. I’ve long since lost my muscle memory for the old way. The menus keep disappearing on me in this emulator.

Another thing that struck me: the classic Mac OS was beautiful. So well designed.

Update: Here’s Mac Missiles, a pretty good Missile Command clone written in 1985 by some kid named Avie Tevanian. He also wrote MacLanding, a Defender clone, but I can’t get that one to work.

Steve Ballmer Unveils USAFacts ★

Andrew Ross Sorkin, writing for DealBook:

On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.

Want to know how many police officers are employed in various parts of the country and compare that against crime rates? Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets and the cost to collect? Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed depression and how much the government spends on it? That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.

He’s paid for the whole thing out of pocket:

With an unlimited budget, he went about hiring a team of researchers in Seattle and made a grant to the University of Pennsylvania to help his staff put the information together. Altogether, he has spent more than $10 million between direct funding and grants.

“Let’s say it costs three, four, five million a year,” he said. “I’m happy to fund the damn thing.”

This is just great.

Shocker: Facebook Instant Articles Are a Bad Deal for Publishers ★

Casey Newton, writing for The Verge:

But across a wide swath of major publishers, results have been uniformly weak. “The revenue in no way backed up the amount of time that was being spent on it,” says Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next. DCN is a trade group that represents many large publishers, including NBC, The New York Times, Conde Nast, ESPN, Slate, Business Insider, and Vox Media. (Vox Media owns The Verge.)

At the end of last year, DCN surveyed its members on the financial performance of content published to third-party platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Google’s AMP project. It found that not one publisher reported earning more money through Instant Articles than they did through their own properties. “We make less money on Instant Articles than we do on mobile web, which is probably everyone’s experience,” said Bill Carey, director of audience development at Slate. And while Facebook reported that publishers using Instant Articles saw readers consuming 25 percent more content, most DCN members had seen no such increase.

Called it.

Cover Photo for May Issue of Bon Appétit Shot Using iPhone 7 Plus ★

Anthony Ha, writing for TechCrunch:

Creative Director Alex Grossman said it made sense to finally put an iPhone pic out front with the May travel issue, particularly given the connection between photography and travel. The cover was shot on an iPhone 7 Plus, in the Tlacolula Market of Oaxaca, Mexico, and it combines people and food, with a woman showing off a strawberry Paleta.

(Also worth noting: Apple is a Bon Appétit advertiser. In fact, an ad on the back cover will highlight the fact that the cover photo was taken on an iPhone.)

Steve Lacy, Musician and Producer Who Prefers Creating Music on His iPhone ★

David Pierce, writing for Wired:

A few minutes after Steve Lacy arrived at a dingy, weed-clouded recording studio in Burbank, the 18-year-old musician flopped down in a plush leather chair in the control room. Vince, one of the studio’s proprietors, came in to show Lacy how the mixing boards and monitors worked. Lacy didn’t care; he was just in it for the chair. He picked up his new black-and-white Rickenbacker guitar, then reached into his Herschel backpack and yanked out a mess of cables. Out of the mess emerged his iRig, an interface adapter that connects his guitar directly into his iPhone 6. He shoved it into the Lightning port and began tuning his instrument, staring at the GarageBand pitch meter through the cracks on the screen of his phone. [...]

It’s a weird recording setup, but it’s working for Lacy. Last year, he was nominated for a Grammy for executive-producing and performing on the 2015 funk-R&B-soul album Ego Death, the third release from The Internet and Lacy’s first with the band. He’s a sought-after producer, featured on albums like J. Cole’s “4 Your Eyez Only” and Kendrick Lamar’s new “Damn.” Earlier in 2017, he released his first solo material, which he’s playing as part of the setlist for The Internet’s worldwide tour. (Somewhere in there he also graduated high school.) The only connection between his many projects? All that music is stored on his iPhone.

How Google Ate CelebrityNetWorth.com ★

Adrianne Jeffries, writing for The Outline:

At the end of it, we just said ‘Look, we’re not comfortable with this.’”

“But then they went ahead and took the data anyway.”

In February 2016, Google started displaying a Featured Snippet for each of the 25,000 celebrities in the CelebrityNetWorth database, Warner said. He knew this because he added a few fake listings for friends who were not celebrities to see if they would pop up as featured answers, and they did.

“Our traffic immediately crumbled,” Warner said. “Comparing January 2016 (a full month where they had not yet scraped our content) to January 2017, our traffic is down 65 percent.” Warner said he had to lay off half his staff. (Google declined to answer specific questions for this story, including whether it was shooting itself in the foot by destroying its best sources of information.)

That’s just outright theft, pure and simple. And it’s foolish — the only reason the good data from CelebrityNetWorth exists is that the site was able to make enough money to hire a staff of researchers. Now that Warner has had to lay off half his staff, the data is surely going to suffer. Forget about “Don’t be evil”, how about “Don’t be stupid”?

AirPods Still on a 6-Week Shipping Delay ★

AirPods are, in my opinion, the best new Apple product in years. I forgot to pack them on a recent trip (out to California for the Mac Pro roundtable), and using wired ear buds for a day made me love my AirPods even more.

But if you order them today, they’re still on a 6-week shipping delay. They’re either unexpectedly popular (like last year’s iPhone SE) or unexpectedly difficult to manufacture (or both).

Proposed Key Path Syntax for Swift ★

David Smith, Michael LeHew, and Joe Groff, explaining why they chose backslash (\) as the syntax for their new key path proposal for Swift:

During review many different sigils were considered:

No Sigil: This matches function type references, but suffers from ambiguity with wanting to actually call a type property. Having to type let foo: KeyPath<Baz, Bar> while consistent with function type references, really is not that great (even for function type references).

Backtick: Borrowing from Lisp, backtick was what we used in initial discussions of this proposal (it was easy to write on a white-board), but it was not chosen because it is hard to type in Markdown, and comes dangerously close to conflicting with other parser intrinsics.

It kind of blows my mind that the ease of typing in Markdown would factor into a syntax decision for Swift. However, I disagree. It is not hard to type a literal backtick in Markdown. Here’s the relevant section of the Markdown syntax documentation.

In short, to include a literal backtick inside a <code> span, you can just use two backticks as the opening and closing delimiters. This input:

```Person.friends[0].name``

produces this HTML output:

<code>`Person.friends[0].name</code>

For the sake of clarity, you can include a space at the beginning (or end) of the delimited code span, which will be omitted from the output, like this:

`` `Person.friends[0].name``

Far be it for me to tell the Swift folks what to do, but I think backtick looks far better in the above example than backslash does. To me, backslash in any language should mean “escape the following character” and nothing else.

Monday, 17 April 2017

Apple’s Achilles Heel ★

Neil Cybart, in his weekly Above Avalon column last week, “The Mac Is Turning into Apple’s Achilles Heel”:

Apple’s decision to change course and develop a new Mac Pro has received near-universal praise from the company’s pro community. While developing a new Mac Pro is the right decision for Apple to make given the current situation, it has become clear that the Mac is a major vulnerability in Apple’s broader product strategy. The product that helped save Apple from bankruptcy 20 years ago is now turning into a barrier that is preventing Apple from focusing on what comes next.

I read this last week and it didn’t sit right with me at all. But I couldn’t put my finger on why until this weekend. It’s actually very simple: I think Cybart’s entire premise is completely backwards. The Mac is not Apple’s Achilles heel. The iPhone is. That’s why the rest of his column doesn’t make much sense.

The iPhone hasn’t suffered because Apple is focused on the Mac. New iPhones come out like clockwork every year. Apple has really gotten it down to a science in recent years. The Mac lineup, however — and the Mac Pro in particular — has clearly suffered from a lack of attention. Where did that institutional attention go? Surely much of it went to iPhone.

I’m not arguing that it’s a mistake for Apple to devote more attention to the iPhone than any other product. Smartphones are the greatest opportunity in the history of mass market consumer goods, and also the greatest opportunity in the history of personal computing. The iPhone epitomizes everything Apple stands for. But it’s a mistake to focus so much attention on the iPhone that other important products suffer.

Saturday, 15 April 2017

Fastly ★

My thanks to Fastly for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Fastly’s content delivery network was built by developers for developers — they speed up sites and applications no matter where your customers are or which devices they use. Fastly integrates seamlessly with your existing stack and workflows, delivering content quickly and securely to your end users while giving you the real-time metrics you need to make better decisions. Fastly customers include open source projects like Python and Ruby, as well as major developer and consumer companies like GitHub, New Relic, and Airbnb.

Special deal for Daring Fireball readers: test up to $50 of traffic for free.

Friday, 14 April 2017

Nintendo Discontinues the NES Classic Edition, Even Though It’s So in Demand You Can’t Get One ★

Nintendo:

Throughout April, [Nintendo of America] territories will receive the last shipments of Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition systems for this year. We encourage anyone interested in obtaining this system to check with retail outlets regarding availability. We understand that it has been difficult for many consumers to find a system, and for that we apologize. We have paid close attention to consumer feedback, and we greatly appreciate the incredible level of consumer interest and support for this product.

This makes no sense to me. I’ve been waiting to buy one at the regular retail price, but it looks like that’s never going to happen.

‘It’s Not What You Would Think’ ★

From a Wall Street Journal report on Trump’s meeting last week with President Xi Jinping of China:

He said they hit it off during their first discussion. Mr. Trump said he told his Chinese counterpart he believed Beijing could easily take care of the North Korea threat. Mr. Xi then explained the history of China and Korea, Mr. Trump said.

“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” Mr. Trump recounted. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power” over North Korea,” he said. “But it’s not what you would think.”

What’s striking about this isn’t that Trump was completely ignorant about China’s relationship with North Korea. That’s not surprising at all. What’s striking is that Trump is so — to borrow Josh Marshall’s phrase — militantly ignorant that he’s not embarrassed to admit this. He’s a laughingstock around the world.

Thursday, 13 April 2017

The Talk Show: ‘Good News, My House Burned Down’ ★

Special guest Matthew Panzarino returns to the show for an in-depth discussion of last week’s “future of the Mac Pro” round table discussion between a handful of Apple executives and journalists who cover the company. We talk about what went wrong with the 2013 Mac Pro design, speculate on the timeline of when Apple made this decision, why touchscreen Macs are almost certainly a bad idea even though a lot of people think they want one, and more.

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Star Ratings Are Garbage, and Hurt Uber and Lyft Drivers ★

Caroline O’Donovan, writing for BuzzFeed, goes deep on the problems with 5-star rating systems:

The other problem is that not everyone can agree on what the star ratings mean — not even the companies themselves. Lyft says that five stars means “awesome,” four means “OK, could be better,” and three means “below average.” But for Uber, five stars is “excellent,” four is “good,” and three is “OK.”

Individuals have different interpretations, too. “For some people, three could mean this is good, while four is great and five is perfect. Some people might say, nowhere is going to be perfect, so I’m going to say five stars is really good, and four is good,” Celis said. “The way you can interpret those stars is infinite, and most people don’t have the exact same system.”

Read through to the end for an anecdote from yours truly. Thumbs-up/thumbs-down is the way to go — everyone agrees what those mean.

Wednesday, 12 April 2017

Burger King Launches Commercial That Triggers ‘OK Google’ ★

Sapna Maheshwari, reporting for The New York Times:

A video from a Burger King marketing agency showed the plan in action: “You’re watching a 15-second Burger King ad, which is unfortunately not enough time to explain all the fresh ingredients in the Whopper sandwich,” the actor in the commercial said. “But I got an idea. O.K. Google, what is the Whopper burger?”

Prompted by the phrase “O.K. Google,” the Google Home device beside the TV in the video lit up, searched the phrase on Wikipedia and stated the ingredients.

But within hours of the ad’s release — and humorous edits to the Whopper Wikipedia page by mischievous users — tests from The Verge and BuzzFeed showed that the commercial had stopped activating the device.

Sort of a jackass move on Burger King’s part, but it was harmless, and it certainly got them a lot of publicity. I’m sure they expected Google to shut them down — what they wanted were all these news stories about the prank.

My question: If the commercial had used “Hey Siri” or “Alexa” instead of “OK Google”, how long would it have taken for Apple or Amazon to cut it off? And why didn’t they address Siri or Alexa?

Columbia Journalism Review: Walt Mossberg on the Future of the Tech Beat ★

Walt Mossberg on the origins of his Personal Tech column for The Wall Street Journal back in 1991:

There were a bunch of computer columns in a lot of other newspapers, and certainly there were computer magazines, but these were all written by geeks for geeks. My pitch to The Journal was that I wanted to write a column that didn’t use a lot of jargon, that treated people with respect for their intelligence and that did two things. One, it helped people figure out how to make this journey into technology by telling them what was good and what was bad on the market, explaining when some new development happened what it meant, what it was, who it might be for. That was one of my goals. The other one was to the use the power of the platform and the voice that I would have in this column, because it was an opinion column in a way, was to push the industry to stop ignoring normal people and stop treating them like they were stupid. That was it. That was my idea, and it worked.

So true.

Don Rickles on The Tonight Show ★

Speaking of late night talk show personalities passing away, I haven’t yet written anything about Don Rickles, who died last week. I just don’t know what to say. I fucking loved Don Rickles, and I loved the era of talk shows he embodied. I feel like he was the last person standing from the Carson era.

I blew most of the weekend digging into YouTube clips of Rickles on The Tonight Show. It’s a goldmine. Hours and hours of great bits. Seriously, if you liked Rickles and the old Tonight Show, just dig in. You’ll get lost quickly, and you’ll bust a gut.

A few of my very favorites:

Don Rickles and Frank Sinatra, 1977 — Johnny Carson isn’t even here. He’s on vacation and Sinatra is guest hosting the show. George Burns and Carrol O’Connor are on the couch. (Burns kills it.)
Frank Sinatra is surprised by Rickles, 1976.
Carson, back from another vacation, discovers Rickles has broken his beloved desktop cigarette box, which you can see here.

Dorothy Mengering, David Letterman’s Mother, Dead at 95 ★

Daniel Kreps, writing for Rolling Stone:

Dorothy Mengering, David Letterman’s mother, or “Dave’s Mom” as she was known to Late Show audiences, “died peacefully” Tuesday at her home in Carmel, Indiana. She was 95.

Awful Announcing has some links to footage of her coverage of the Winter Olympics for The Late Show in 1994 through 2002. Classic stuff.

Tuesday, 11 April 2017

Amazon Continues to Grow Lead Over Google as Starting Point for Online Shoppers ★

What’s interesting here aren’t the most recent numbers, but the stark trendline over the past three years. Amazon is eating Google’s lunch.

A personal anecdote:

Over the weekend I impulse purchased a clip-on booklight from Moleskine. It was like $19. It looked OK, and I liked the idea of having one that’s rechargeable over USB. Got it home, charged it, and it was busted — the light only worked when it was actually plugged into a USB port. Unplugged, it simply didn’t work. I looked on Amazon, and lo, this product gets terrible reviews, many of them from people seeing problems exactly like mine. The consensus is that Moleskine’s booklight is a piece of garbage. I thought, “This is why I shop for stuff like this at Amazon.”

The thought of searching through Google never entered my mind.

Samsung’s Bixby Assistant Won’t Support Voice Commands When Galaxy S8 Launches ★

Nick Statt, reporting for The Verge:

However, in a statement given to The Verge this afternoon, Samsung admits that Bixby’s headline feature — voice control — won’t be ready in time for when the device ships to US consumers on April 21st. Instead, owners of the S8 will have to wait for a software update to be released later this spring.

“Key features of Bixby, including Vision, Home, and Reminder, will be available with the global launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 on April 21. Bixby Voice will be available in the US on the Galaxy S8 later this spring,” Samsung’s statement reads.

This voice assistant stuff is hard.

Monday, 10 April 2017

Netflix vs. Amazon Spending on Video Content ★

Felix Richter, writing for Statista:

If you think that Amazon isn’t serious about Prime Video, the company’s video streaming service included with every Prime membership, think again. According to analysts at JPMorgan, the Seattle-based e-commerce giant is set to spend $4.5 billion on video content this year. While that is still $1.5 billion shy of the $6 billion that market leader Netflix is planning to shell out this year, it is still a pretty clear statement of intent on Amazon’s part.

Looks like Amazon is about ~~one year~~ two years behind Netflix in spending.

Technical Analysis of the Facebook App Bundle for iOS ★

Alexandre Colucci:

The version 66.0 was a 165 MB app on an iPad Air 2 (64-bit). It was a monolithic app with its main binary being more than 100 MB.

The version 87.0 is now available: 253 MB on the same iPad Air 2 with only 64-bit code. In just 6 months, the Facebook.app size grew by 88 MB!

It’s the most popular third-party app in the world, and it’s structured like a pile of garbage. At least 40 MB of resources are duplicated. Imagine how much collective bandwidth and storage Facebook is wasting here.

A Man Was Dragged Off a United Plane After the Airline Overbooked the Flight ★

Alicia Melville-Smith, reporting for BuzzFeed:

Bridges said passengers were allowed to board the flight but were later told four people would need to give up their seats for four United employees who were needed in Louisville on Monday.

She said no passengers volunteered, so a manager came aboard and said passengers would be randomly selected and asked to leave.

When asked to leave, the man in the video became “very upset” and said he was a doctor who had patients to see the next day, Bridges said. A manager then told him security would be called if he refused to leave the plane. Three security guards then removed him from his seat while other passengers yelled in disgust.

The description doesn’t do justice to the brutality of this incident. It’s a new world, where everyone is equipped with a high definition video camera.

And it gets even worse: somehow the guy got back on the plane, bloody and panicked, and United removed him again — on a stretcher.

Update: Another video. This one is hard to watch: blood streaming from his mouth, the man is repeating over and over, “Just kill me” while clutching the curtain at the back of the cabin.

Saturday, 8 April 2017

Squarespace ★

My thanks to Squarespace for once again sponsoring the DF RSS feed. Here’s a fun story. The other day I got takeout from a great new steak sandwich shop here in Philly called Cleavers. They have a cool website, too. Guess what? Made with Squarespace.

You should create your next website with Squarespace. Their award-winning website templates are a beautiful way to present your ideas online. You can try Squarespace for free. When you’re ready to subscribe, get 10 percent off at squarespace.com with offer code “DARING17”.

Friday, 7 April 2017

Walt Mossberg Is Retiring in June ★

Walt Mossberg:

So it seems fitting to me that I’ll be retiring this coming June, almost exactly 47 years later. I’ll be hanging it up shortly after the 2017 edition of the Code Conference, a wonderful event I co-founded in 2003 and which I could never have imagined back then in Detroit.

I didn’t make this decision lightly or hastily or under pressure. It emerged from months of thought and months of talks with my wise wife, my family, and close friends. It wasn’t prompted by my employer or by some dire health diagnosis. It just seems like the right time to step away. I’m ready for something new.

Before Mossberg, tech writing was for tech enthusiasts. Mossberg is a tech enthusiast, but what he did at The Wall Street Journal is bring enthusiasm for tech — particularly the personal computer industry — to a truly mainstream audience. His influence — especially during his years at the Journal — is impossible to overstate.

Here’s a photo I took of Mossberg talking to Steve Jobs in the hands-on area after the introduction of the original iPad in 2010.

Wednesday, 5 April 2017

The 2016 Panic Report ★

Cabel Sasser’s annual report for Panic, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Mostly good news, but I’ll focus on the bad:

iOS continues to haunt us. If you remember, 2016 was the year we killed Status Board, our very nice data visualization app. Now, a lot of it was our fault. But it was another blow to our heavy investment in pro-level iOS apps a couple years ago, a decision we’re still feeling the ramifications of today as we revert back to a deep focus on macOS. Trying to do macOS quality work on iOS cost us a lot of time for sadly not much payoff. We love iOS, we love our iPhones, and we love our iPads. But we remain convinced that it’s not — yet? — possible to make a living selling pro software on those platforms. Which is a real bummer!

A bummer indeed. There are Mac-quality pro apps for iOS, but nowhere near as many as there are on the Mac.

OmniOutliner 5.0 ★

Great update to one of the very best apps ever made. That sounds like hyperbole but I mean it — OmniOutliner is outstanding — a great Mac app and a great outliner. By that I mean it isn’t just a good outliner that runs on the Mac. It’s an outliner that does things the Mac way. If I were to make a list of the very best indie Mac apps, OmniOutliner would be on it.

And if you’ve never used a real outliner, you should try it. I think people get a bad taste in their mouths from the always-awkward outlining modes in word processors. A real outliner is so much better, and such a great tool.

$60 for the Pro version and a bargain at just $10 for the Essentials version.

Tuesday, 4 April 2017

Matthew Panzarino on Yesterday’s Mac Briefing ★

Matthew Panzarino’s take on yesterday’s Mac briefing at Apple:

I also ask what the moment was like, the turning point at which they knew that the current Mac Pro’s design wasn’t the way forward.

“I wish I could give you the kind of answer you want with that, which is, ‘oh, there was a day and a meeting and we all got together and said X,’” says Schiller, “but it rarely works that way.”

“We all went on our own emotional journeys, I’d say,” laughs Federighi. “There were periods of denial and acceptance. We all went on that arc.”

John Ternus added, “There definitely wasn’t a single point. Looking at how things are doing, looking at what we can do within the space and eventually come to a conclusion, but it’s not like it’s an ‘a-ha’ moment.”

This was an unprecedented reveal of Apple’s future plans for the Mac. The new, more open Apple continues to surprise. But one thing remains unchanged: Apple does not talk about development timelines. Several attempts were made to get Apple to tell us when they realized they needed to “completely rethink” the Mac Pro, and they wouldn’t budge. Federighi’s comment was lighthearted, but probably the closest to the truth that we got — I think Apple was rightfully proud of the 2013 Mac Pro (“Can’t innovate anymore, my ass”), and it was difficult to admit it was the wrong bet.

(I’d like to thank Panzarino for sharing with me TechCrunch’s transcript of the discussion, and his colleagues Greg Kumparak, Brian Heater, and Anthony Ha for doing the actual transcription. My piece today was much the better for it.)

Veteran Apple Designer Christopher Stringer Is Leaving ★

Reed Albergotti, reporting for The Information:

Long time Apple industrial designer Christopher Stringer is leaving the company in another shakeup to Apple’s vaunted design team.

Mr. Stringer, who was at Apple for 21 years, was involved in the first iPhones and iPads and has a rare semi-public profile. He was a key witness in Apple’s years-long legal case against Samsung, testifying about Apple’s painstaking industrial design process.

From a friend familiar with Stringer’s work: “Great holistic thinker, from big picture ideals down to unseen details like dialing in the friction of a connector just right.”

Monday, 3 April 2017

Imagination Technologies’ Shares Plunge 70 Percent After Apple Ditches Firm ★

Paul Sandle, reporting for Reuters:

Imagination Technologies has been told by Apple, its biggest customer, that the maker of iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches is to stop using its graphics technology in its new products, sending shares in the company crashing by more than 70 percent on Monday.

Imagination said Apple, which accounts for about half its revenue, had notified the British firm it was developing its own graphics chips and would no longer use Imagination’s processing designs in 15 months to two years time.

Imagination’s own announcement is a real bridge burner:

Apple has used Imagination’s technology and intellectual property for many years. It has formed the basis of Graphics Processor Units (“GPUs”) in Apple’s phones, tablets, iPods, TVs and watches. Apple has asserted that it has been working on a separate, independent graphics design in order to control its products and will be reducing its future reliance on Imagination’s technology.

Apple has not presented any evidence to substantiate its assertion that it will no longer require Imagination’s technology, without violating Imagination’s patents, intellectual property and confidential information. This evidence has been requested by Imagination but Apple has declined to provide it.

Further, Imagination believes that it would be extremely challenging to design a brand new GPU architecture from basics without infringing its intellectual property rights, accordingly Imagination does not accept Apple’s assertions.

In other words, we’ll see you in court. Seems petulant to do this in public.

Twitter Poll on the Touch Bar ★

Steven Troughton-Smith asked a simple question in a Twitter poll last night:

Just out of interest, with @marcoarment in mind, does anybody actually like the Touch Bar of the new MacBook Pro?

With over 1,000 responses, the results were effectively 50-50. What I’m curious about is how many responders have used a MacBook with the Touch Bar for at least a week or two.

The Marco Arment angle is based on the fact that he returned his MacBook with Touch Bar and replaced it with the new MacBook Pro with the traditional function keys. I’ve heard from a few other friends that they don’t like it either.

Saturday, 1 April 2017

BuildZoom ★

My thanks to BuildZoom for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Tell BuildZoom about your remodeling or building project, and they’ll connect you with four great contractors who will visit your property, then provide you with bids through BuildZoom.

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Upcoming Is Back ★

Andy Baio, on the About page for the newly relaunched Upcoming:

Launched in 2003, before Flickr or Facebook, Upcoming was the first site to use a social network for event discovery. After two years, Upcoming was acquired by Yahoo, running for a decade before Yahoo shuttered it in 2013.

Shortly after they shut it down, Yahoo offered to sell the domain back to me, an unprecedented move for a former acquisition.

I decided to launch a Kickstarter project to gauge interest in bringing Upcoming back from the dead. With the incredible support and infinite patience of 1,787 backers, I rebuilt Upcoming from scratch, restored the event archive, and relaunched the community in March 2017.

Thank you for believing in it.

Looks great. Somehow feels karmically right that the return of Upcoming has coincided with the end of The Deck.

The Talk Show: ‘Warmest Regards’ ★

Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show. Topics include the end of The Deck ad network, my weird story about getting kicked out of Amazon’s affiliate program, Apple’s new products announced last week (Red iPhone 7 models, larger-capacity iPhone SEs, the new 9.7-inch just-plain iPad, and Apple’s excellent new Clips app), Samsung’s new Galaxy S8, Twitter’s new reply system, CarPlay getting its ass kicked in a head-to-head comparison with Android Auto, ISPs and Privacy, and more.

Also, a brief debate over where to position the MacOS Dock.

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Dan Frommer: ‘Samsung’s Galaxy S8 Shows Apple Is Behind the Smartphone Design Trend’ ★

Dan Frommer, writing for Recode:

While Apple pioneered the all-screen phone concept with the first iPhone, Samsung and other companies have recently pushed it further, trimming the frame around the display so much that the forehead and chin on the new Galaxy S8 are barely there.

For another example, Andy Rubin — the founder of Android, and before that one of the people behind the Sidekick phone — recently tweeted a teaser photo of another slick-looking, edge-to-edge device, presumably from the handset company he’s working on, called Essential.

Rubin’s teaser shot for the Essential truly is impressive — it shows a true edge-to-edge design, with almost no bezels on either the sides or the top and bottom. Looks very cool. But: it’s vaporware. Shipping is what counts, and the Galaxy S8 is shipping.

I’ve been hearing that Apple is working on an “edge-to-edge” iPhone design since early last year. If Apple truly eliminates the chin and forehead, they’ll leap ahead of Samsung. But I don’t see how anyone can deny that Samsung is ahead in the race to eliminate bezels.

There’s a lot more to “design” than how a phone looks from the front, though. And to me, the Galaxy S8 looks like it was only designed with the front face in mind. I don’t think the back looks good, and the placement of the fingerprint scanner is undeniably awkward. And the ports and speaker holes on the bottom are, as usual for Samsung, misaligned.

Twitter Rearranges Deck Chairs on Titanic ★

Twitter’s design team, explaining why they changed the default new user avatar from an egg to a bland silhouette:

We’ve noticed patterns of behavior with accounts that are created only to harass others — often they don’t take the time to personalize their accounts. This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior, which isn’t fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven’t yet personalized their profile photo.

This is so ridiculous that a lot of people suspected it was an April Fool’s gag. The problem is the actual harassment, not the egg icons. Changing the icon doesn’t affect the actual problem at all.

And it’s a bad idea. The egg was something Twitter owned. It fit marvelously with their brand. Their icon is a bird. Their “new tweet” button shows a feather. The egg felt totally Twitter. This new silhouette looks like it came out of a stock icon set.

(There is some interesting stuff in this post about the work they did to make the silhouette feel gender-neutral rather than male.)