Linked List: July 9, 2019

Tuesday, 9 July 2019

Katie Notopoulos Tried Emailing Like a CEO ★

Katie Notopoulos, writing at BuzzFeed:

What trips me up most is my habit of scanning my inbox, often on my phone, opening an email, reading it, and thinking, “I’ll reply to that later when I’m at my computer and/or not in the middle of this other project and can give a full reply.” Then I leave it marked as “read” and forget about it. I check my inbox constantly, but I only actually deal with my emails in a deliberate way during a few dedicated chunks of my day.

That is me.

The other key part of boss-style email is doing a lot of email on the phone. This meant goodbye to my old crutch of “I’ll reply when I get to a computer.” I would fire off emails from my phone on the subway, walking around at lunch, on the toilet at the office. For the first time, I actually started using the suggested Gmail replies, which are actually pretty useful in the sense of purely transmitting information.

That first Monday, as I fired off a bunch of not-super-important emails, something strange happened. I felt… extremely good. I was high on the fumes of efficiency. No longer did a little cloud hang over me, the nagging feeling you get when you know you’re supposed to do something and can’t remember what.

I’ve been thinking about this lately — that I should treat email more like I treat texting. A few words — or maybe just an emoji — and that’s it.

Walt Mossberg’s Review of the Original iPhone ★

As we look back at Jony Ive’s career at Apple, surely the high water mark was the original iPhone in 2007. Walt Mossberg’s review holds up perfectly — he absolutely nailed it:

The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly. […]

In addition, even when you have great AT&T coverage, the iPhone can’t run on AT&T’s fastest cellular data network. Instead, it uses a pokey network called EDGE, which is far slower than the fastest networks from Verizon or Sprint that power many other smart phones. And the initial iPhone model cannot be upgraded to use the faster networks.

The iPhone compensates by being one of the few smart phones that can also use Wi-Fi wireless networks. When you have access to Wi-Fi, the iPhone flies on the Web. Not only that, but the iPhone automatically switches from EDGE to known Wi-Fi networks when it finds them, and pops up a list of new Wi-Fi networks it encounters as you move.

Hard to believe, in hindsight, that Wi-Fi was a novel feature. My favorite part of the review is the chart comparing the iPhone to its top rivals circa 2007 — the Samsung BlackJack, BlackBerry 8800, and Treo 700p. They look like relics. One thing I’ve noticed recently is that I still see people — some of them surprisingly young — using basic flip phones. But I never see anyone using a BlackBerry-style phone with a QWERTY keyboard.

(The other funny thing, looking back, is how Samsung was still Samsung back then, copying not only BlackBerry’s form factor but even its goddamn name.)

On the Bugginess of This Year’s OS Betas From Apple ★

Ulysses:

During the last couple of weeks, quite a few people contacted us about crashes, hangs and other problems with Ulysses on devices running the beta versions of iOS 13, iPadOS and macOS Catalina. We’ve been asked a couple of times if we couldn’t offer a beta version of Ulysses that works fine on the new OSes. Unfortunately, for the time being, we can’t.

From our experience with previous OS updates, we feel safe to say that these betas are extraordinarily unstable and buggy. After all, beta versions of operating systems are still just beta versions — they are buggy, they are crash-prone, and they do lose data. Whereas in recent years, it was pretty safe to install preview versions early on, this year that’s definitely not the case (see for example this report on Cult of Mac).

Most impactful for us, however, is that the (great, great) updates done to iCloud are also leading to severe problems with the service. As iCloud is Apple’s sync service, it’s beyond our power to solve them, of course. Some public beta users reported synchronization outages and data loss that propagated to devices that did not even run the beta but were just connected via iCloud.

I’ve heard this from a bunch of developers. Right now iCloud is dangerous on the beta OSes. That’s not a complaint in and of itself; if there weren’t bugs they wouldn’t be betas. But I think it was a bad idea for Apple to release public betas at this stage. One trick I learned long ago is to install MacOS betas on an external hard drive and keep my regular startup drive unmounted while running the beta OS. But iCloud is a data store too, and you can’t unmount it.

iOS 12 to 13 Comparison Screenshots ★

Nice visual guide to what’s new — so far — in iOS 13 from Ryan Burnett. Twitter is pretty good for something like this.

Study Claims Huawei Staff and Chinese Military Have Deep Links ★

CNBC:

A new analysis of CVs of Huawei staff appeared to reveal deeper links between the technology giant and China’s military and intelligence bodies than had been previously acknowledged by the firm.

The paper, which looks at employment records of Huawei employees, concluded that “key mid-level technical personnel employed by Huawei have strong backgrounds in work closely associated with intelligence gathering and military activities.” Some employees can be linked “to specific instances of hacking or industrial espionage conducted against Western firms,” it claimed.

Get me to the fainting couch. What a shocker.

Matthew Panzarino: ‘Apple Sans Ive’ ★

Matthew Panzarino:

The narratives, to summarize, are essentially that:

Jony had checked out, become incompetent or just plain lazy

Apple is doomed because he is leaving

If those narratives look contradictory, then you have eyes.

If you take the sum of the breathless (dare I say thirsty) stories tying together a bunch of anecdotes about Jony’s last couple of years, they are trying to paint a picture of a legendary design figure that has abandoned the team and company he helped build, leading to a stagnation of forward progress — while at the same time trying to argue that the company is doomed without him.

OK.

Perhaps my favorite piece on Ive’s departure. I agree with the whole thing, top to bottom, particularly his dismissal of the, as he says, “thirsty” takes on Ive’s last few years.

Apple Revamps MacBook Lineup ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today updated MacBook Air, adding True Tone to its Retina display for a more natural viewing experience, and lowering the price to $1,099, with an even lower price of $999 for college students. In addition, the entry-level $1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro has been updated with the latest 8th-generation quad-core processors, making it two times more powerful than before. It also now features Touch Bar and Touch ID, a True Tone Retina display and the Apple T2 Security Chip, and is available for $1,199 for college students.

In addition to bumping the specs on these two models and lowering their prices, Apple also got rid of the non-retina Air (except for education institutional buyers, and at retailers like Best Buy) and completely dropped the 12-inch MacBook. We all knew the non-retina Air would eventually — finally — go away. Unless I’m overlooking something, ~~Apple no longer sells (to consumers) any devices with non-retina displays~~. Update: I did overlook something: the entry level 21-inch iMac is still non-retina.

I’m a little surprised to see the MacBook dropped completely, but the Air, though bigger, is a much more capable machine. Overall, it is a tremendous simplification of the entire MacBook lineup, and that’s a good thing. Retina Air and two sizes of MacBook Pro — hard to see how it could get any simpler. Other than the increase in size of the “smallest” MacBook, the only knock against today’s revamp is that the starting price (for those other than college students) has jumped from $1000 to $1100.

Update: A few other observations:

Apple isn’t making a point of it, but these new MacBooks both have the new third-generation butterfly keyboards.
According to Student Monitor, MacBooks have 60 percent market share among college students. That’s impressive period, but downright bananas for those of us who remember where Macs were market-share-wise 20 years ago.
Apple’s back-to-school promotion saves you up to $200 and includes a pair of Beats Studio 3 wireless headphones, which retail for $300. That’s a great deal.

Trump Can’t Block Critics From His Twitter Account, Appeals Court Rules ★

Charlie Savage, reporting for The New York Times:

President Trump has been violating the Constitution by blocking people from following his Twitter account because they criticized or mocked him, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday. The ruling could have broader implications for how the First Amendment applies to the social-media era.

Because Mr. Trump uses Twitter to conduct government business, he cannot exclude some Americans from reading his posts — and engaging in conversations in the replies to them — because he does not like their views, a three-judge panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled unanimously.

This is the least important Trump controversy I can think of, but I do find it an interesting case. With the absurd number of replies he gets with each tweet — thousands, if not tens of thousands — I can’t see why he even bothers blocking people. But I like to think he’s actually sitting there, wasting time each day poking buttons in the Twitter app, angrily blocking people.