Linked List: October 2, 2018

Tuesday, 2 October 2018

Adding Device Frames to iPhone XS and XS Max Screenshots With Shortcuts ★

Very cool scripts for the iOS 12 Shortcuts app from Federico Viticci.

Apple Watch Series 4 Fall Detection Tested by a Hollywood Stunt Double ★

Of course Joanna Stern would hire a professional stuntwoman. Spoiler: the fall detection seems to work very well.

iPhone XS: Why It’s a Whole New Camera ★

Sebastiaan de With — co-creator of the excellent Halide camera app — has a deep dive on changes to the iPhone XS camera system. One fascinating development: RAW images are way noisier than they are on an iPhone X. Halide has a pretty good solution they’re calling “Smart RAW”.

If you’ve seen people wondering whether the iPhone XS is applying a tacky “beauty filter” to skin tones, send them to this article. It explains what is really going on.

Microsoft Surface Event 2018: The 5 Biggest Announcements ★

Tablets, laptops, Bluetooth headphones. A new black color option. They all look nice.

Jason Snell on Apple Watch Series 4 ★

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

The result is that I like lots of aspects of the watch faces on the Series 4, but after more than a week of fiddling with complications and faces, I’ve yet to settle on one that I am comfortable with. I find myself wanting to mix and match, which isn’t actually allowed. Perhaps as more apps add support for the new complication sizes, I will find that their utility balances out my preference for the aesthetics of the older faces. Right now I’m using Infograph with a handful of complications around the edges, but I don’t love it. There’s still something missing.

The circle of the Utility and Infograph watch faces are exactly the same size. There’s no reason that Utility shouldn’t use modern complications. I understand that Apple may have had bigger fish to fry in watchOS 5, but it feels like it’s time for a upgrade and rethink of all the Apple Watch faces.

Agreed completely.

Amazon to Raise Minimum Wage to $15 for All U.S. Workers ★

Karen Weise, reporting for The New York Times:

Even Amazon can get squeezed by political pressure and a tight labor market. The online giant on Tuesday said it would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for all of its United States workers.

It said the pay increase would include part-time workers and those hired through temporary agencies. The company said it would also lobby Washington to raise the federal minimum wage.

Amazon said the new wages would apply to more than 250,000 Amazon employees, including those at the grocery chain Whole Foods, as well as the more than 100,000 seasonal employees it will hire for the holiday season. They go into effect on Nov. 1.

Check out the exuberant reaction from employees at a California fulfillment center when this was announced this morning.

The iPhone Franchise ★

I’m still catching up on coverage of Apple’s iPhone and Apple Watch event last month. Ben Thompson makes some excellent points:

The strategy is, dare I say, bordering on over-confidence. Apple is raising prices on its best product even as that product’s relative differentiation from the company’s next best model is the smallest it has ever been.

Here, though, I thought the keynote’s “Mission: Impossible”-themed opening really hit the mark: the reason why franchises rule Hollywood is their dependability. Sure, they cost a fortune to make and to market, but they are known quantities that sell all over the world — $735 million-to-date for the latest Tom Cruise thriller, to take a pertinent example.

That is the iPhone: it is a franchise, the closest thing to a hardware annuity stream tech has ever seen. Some people buy an iPhone every year; some are on a two-year cycle; others wait for screens to crack, batteries to die, or apps to slow. Nearly all, though, buy another iPhone, making the purpose of yesterday’s keynote less an exercise in selling a device and more a matter of informing self-selected segments which device they will ultimately buy, and for what price.

How long does this continue? Ten years? Longer? It seems to me there’s no end in sight. The franchise isn’t just still going strong, it’s stronger than ever.