Linked List: April 30, 2018

Monday, 30 April 2018

AppleInsider on MacBook Keyboard Reliability 

Mike Wuerthele, reporting for AppleInsider:

All data has been collected from assorted Apple Genius Bars in the U.S. that we have been working with for several years, as well as Apple-authorized third-party repair shops.

The 2014 MacBook Pro model year saw 2120 service events in the first year, with 118 related to keyboard issues necessitating an upper case replacement — 5.6 percent of all MacBook Pros serviced in the first year. The 2015 has 1904 service tickets, with 114 relating to the keyboard, making 6.0 percent. […]

Apple released the new keyboard with the MacBook, and moved the design to the 2016 MacBook Pro. In the first year of the 2016 MacBook Pro, our data gathered 1402 warranty events, with 165 related to only the keyboard and not including the Touch Bar — 11.8 percent.

We don’t have a full year of data for the 2017 MacBook Pro yet. But, since release in June 2017, our data set has 1161 captured service events with 94 related to keyboard issues also not including any Touch Bar issues — 8.1 percent.

Kudos to AppleInsider for doing the research for this. But they seem to be drawing the wrong conclusion from their data. They haven’t shown that keyboards are twice as likely to fail, but that when a 2016 MacBook Pro needs warranty service, it’s twice as likely to be for the keyboard as from previous models. And the number for 2017 models is about halfway between. 2016 seemed like a bad year, but the 2017 numbers are only slightly higher.

Update: I thought AppleInsider made this clear, but apparently not. These numbers come from a small number of Apple Stores and authorized repair shops where AppleInsider has sources who leaked these numbers. These are not the numbers for all MacBook Pros in those years. Not even close.

The Washington Post: ‘WhatsApp Founder Jan Koum Plans to Leave After Broad Clashes With Parent Facebook’ 

Elizabeth Dwoskin, writing for The Washington Post:

The billionaire chief executive of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, is planning to leave the company after clashing with its parent, Facebook, over the popular messaging service’s strategy and Facebook’s attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption, according to people familiar with internal discussions.

Koum, who sold WhatsApp to Facebook for more than $19 billion in 2014, also plans to step down from Facebook’s board of directors, according to these people. The date of his departure isn’t known. […]

Another point of disagreement was over WhatsApp’s encryption. In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, a security feature that scrambles people’s messages so that outsiders, including WhatsApp’s owners, can’t read them. Facebook executives wanted to make it easier for businesses to use its tools, and WhatsApp executives believed that doing so would require some weakening of its encryption.

Ultimately, Koum was worn down by the differences in approach, the people said. Other WhatsApp employees are demoralized and plan to to leave in November, four years and a month after the Facebook acquisition, when they are allowed to exercise all their stock options under the terms of the Facebook deal, according to the people.

Not a good sign when the people who care most about privacy are being driven out of the company.

Zac Cichy Hosts Yours Truly on The Menu Bar 

Zac Cichy and Andrew J. Clark’s The Menu Bar is one of my favorite new (or in their case, rebooted) podcasts this year. It was my pleasure to be a guest on last week’s show:

Zac goes one on one with John Gruber to discuss the Apple memo that leaked about Apple leaks, why Beats was a good purchase, why John thinks Netflix might buy Spotify, how Apple might bundle Apple Music and TV shows, iPad productivity low hanging fruit, and more.

Reconsidering the Hardware Kindle Interface 

Craig Mod, on how the iOS Kindle interaction model has leaked out to Amazon’s hardware readers as well:

What is the iOS Kindle interaction model? The iOS Kindle model is the “hidden spaces” model. That is, all active interface elements are invisible. This “hidden spaces” model of interaction is supremely user antagonistic.

There are no affordances to the taps. No edges to the active areas. Nothing to hint at what might happen. This creates what I call a “brittle” interface — where one wrong tap sends you careening in an unknown direction, without knowing why or how you got there.

I’ve had several Kindles over the years, and never liked one enough to really enjoy it. I agree completely with Mod’s suggestion that they add hardware buttons for page turning and the menu.

Michael Hayden: ‘The End of Intelligence’ 

Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, in an op-ed for The New York Times:

The veneer of civilization, I concluded, was quite thin — a natural thought for an intelligence officer whose profession trends pessimistic and whose work is consumed by threats and dangers. Over the years I had learned that the traditions and institutions that protect us from living Hobbesian “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” lives are inherently fragile and demand careful tending. In America today, they are under serious stress.

It was no accident that the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year in 2016 was “post-truth,” a condition where facts are less influential in shaping opinion than emotion and personal belief. To adopt post-truth thinking is to depart from Enlightenment ideas, dominant in the West since the 17th century, that value experience and expertise, the centrality of fact, humility in the face of complexity, the need for study and a respect for ideas.

Truth versus post-truth is a far more important battle than left versus right.