Linked List: September 26, 2018

Wednesday, 26 September 2018

WSJ Claims iPhone XR’s Delayed Release Is Strategic ★

Tripp Mickle, Yoko Kubota, and Takashi Mochizuki, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal:

Last year’s release of the high-end iPhone X came six weeks after Apple’s other two new, less expensive smartphones because of what The Wall Street Journal and others reported were production delays involving its advanced organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, screen.

This year, according to people familiar with Apple’s production plans, the company prioritized production of its two pricier OLED models, the iPhone XS and XS Max, whose prices start at about $1,000. Both will hit stores Friday, followed five weeks later by the least expensive new model, the XR, which has an LCD screen and a starting price of $749.

The staggered release gives Apple a month to sell the higher-end models without cheaper competition from itself. It also simplifies logistics and retail demands and could strengthen Apple’s ability to forecast sales and production of all three models through the Christmas holidays, analysts and supply chain experts said.

One thing the Journal doesn’t mention is advertising. With a staggered release, Apple can spend a month advertising only the iPhone XS and XS Max. Then come mid-October, promote the hell out of the iPhone XR. The iPhone XS ads I’ve seen — TV, print, billboards — focus entirely on the new gold finish and the fact that there are two sizes of the same phone. The tone is luxury — dark backgrounds, dramatic lighting. Just a guess but I’ll bet the colorful lineup of iPhone XR models gets a more playful ad campaign.

I have no idea what’s really going on, how much of this is deliberate on Apple’s part and how much is the result of actual production problems. For all I know Apple really did want to get the XR into stores last week, alongside the XS. But marketing-wise that doesn’t make much sense. A staggered release gives both the XS and XR time in the spotlight.

(And the XR deserves a big ad campaign. It’s not last year’s phone at a lower price. It’s an all-new iPhone with cutting edge specs and features and an all-new design.)

Ben Brooks: Mobile Safari Content Blocker Evaluations, September 2018 ★

Ben Brooks:

I ran another round of content blocker testing for Mobile Safari in order to take a look at which ones are the “best” right now. To be fair: it’s really hard to find these content blockers on the App Store now, so I grabbed the ones which looked the most popular to me (top lists, and top search results) and then did the testing to see which was the best.

Now, I am using a particular word choice here: best. In the past I mostly evaluated on speed or website size reductions. This was problematic because a content blocker could work out to be very fast, while still breaking the usability of the site.

I love his subjective focus on “best”, and agree with his conclusions. Firefox Focus is an interesting option because it acts both as a system-wide Safari content blocker and as a standalone always-private web browser app. No special private or incognito mode — it’s always private, with no saved cookies, no history, etc.

I’d love to see someone do a survey of the field for Mac content blockers. (Brooks is all-in on iOS and doesn’t use a Mac any more.)

Fun Intro to Siri Shortcuts ★

Neat 15-minute intro to iOS 12’s Siri Shortcuts by Quinn Nelson. I haven’t really dug into iOS 12’s Shortcuts yet, but this video got me more excited about it than I expected.

Dear Young People: ‘Don’t Vote’ ★

I love this ad. Share it far and wide.

Slate: ‘Apple News Is Giving the Media Everything It Wants — Except Money’ ★

Will Oremus, writing for Slate:

Launched to rather tepid fanfare three years ago, Apple’s mobile news app has recently surged in popularity and influence, if publishers’ traffic figures are any indication. Sources at several news outlets say they’ve seen their audience on Apple News multiply in 2018 alone. Some now say it has become one of their top traffic sources, alongside Facebook and Google. At Slate, which disclosed its data for this story, page views on Apple News have roughly tripled since September 2017, and the app recently surpassed Facebook as a driver of readership. […]

The Information reported in February that there were days when Vox got half of its daily traffic from Apple News. Business Insider reported in May that Vice’s Apple News traffic had more than doubled in the past year. Digiday reported in January that ABC News had more than 400,000 people signed up for its alerts on Apple News.

Mother Jones, meanwhile, has seen a 400 percent leap in Apple News audience since last September, said Ben Dreyfuss, its editorial director for growth and strategy. The spike began in the first few months of 2018, he added, when readership doubled in consecutive months.

The catch: no one seems to be making any money from this traffic.

WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850 Million Behind to Leave Facebook Early ★

Parmy Olson, writing for Forbes:

For his part, Acton had proposed monetizing WhatsApp through a metered-user model, charging, say, a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up. “You build it once, it runs everywhere in every country,” Acton says. “You don’t need a sophisticated sales force. It’s a very simple business.”

Acton’s plan was shot down by Sandberg. “Her words were ‘It won’t scale.’”

“I called her out one time,” says Acton, who sensed there might be greed at play. “I was like, ‘No, you don’t mean that it won’t scale. You mean it won’t make as much money as… ,’ and she kind of hemmed and hawed a little. And we moved on.” […]

When Acton reached Zuckerberg’s office, a Facebook lawyer was present. Acton made clear that the disagreement — Facebook wanted to make money through ads, and he wanted to make it from high-volume users — meant he could get his full allocation of stock. Facebook’s legal team disagreed, saying that WhatsApp had only been exploring monetization initiatives, not “implementing” them. Zuckerberg, for his part, had a simple message: “He was like, This is probably the last time you’ll ever talk to me.”

Sounds like a delightful place to work.