Linked List: January 28, 2020

Tuesday, 28 January 2020

Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery:

It’s tempting to dwell on the Jobs point — I really do think the iPad is the product that misses him the most — but the truth is that the long-term sustainable source of innovation on the iPad should have come from 3rd-party developers. Look at Gruber’s example for the Mac of graphic designers and illustrators: while MacPaint showed what was possible, the revolution was led by software from Aldus (PageMaker), Quark (QuarkXPress), and Adobe (Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat). By the time the Mac turned 10, Apple was a $2 billion company, while Adobe was worth $1 billion.

There are, needless to say, no companies built on the iPad that are worth anything approaching $1 billion in 2020 dollars, much less in 1994 dollars, even as the total addressable market has exploded, and one big reason is that $4.99 price point. Apple set the standard that highly complex, innovative software that was only possible on the iPad could only ever earn 5 bucks from a customer forever (updates, of course, were free).

There are developers making good money with professional caliber iPad apps. But nothing like the companies that were built around the Mac.

QAnon Conspiracy Theorists’ Magic Cure for Coronavirus Is Drinking Bleach ★

Will Sommer, writing for The Daily Beast:

As the global death toll from an alarming new coronavirus surged this week, promoters of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory were urging their fans to ward off the illness by purchasing and drinking dangerous bleach.

The substance — dubbed “Miracle Mineral Solution” or “MMS” — has long been promoted by fringe groups as a combination miracle cure and vaccine for everything from autism to cancer and HIV/AIDS.

The Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly warned consumers not to drink MMS, last year calling it effectively a “dangerous bleach” that could cause “severe vomiting” and “acute liver failure.” But those warnings haven’t stopped QAnon devotees — who believe in a world where Donald Trump is at war with shadowy deep-state “cabal” — from promoting a lethal substance as a salve for a health crisis that speaks to the darkest recesses of fringe thought.

Drink up, morons. And don’t forget to rinse your eyes with that stuff, too — that’s how the virus spreads.

NPR: ‘Acclaimed Harvard Scientist Is Arrested, Accused of Lying About Ties to China’ ★

Bill Chappell, reporting for NPR:

Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has been arrested and criminally charged with making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the U.S. Defense Department about his ties to a Chinese government program to recruit foreign scientists and researchers.

The Justice Department says Lieber, 60, lied about his contact with the Chinese program known as the Thousand Talents Plan, which the U.S. has previously flagged as a serious intelligence concern. He also is accused of lying about about a lucrative contract he signed with China’s Wuhan University of Technology.

In an affidavit unsealed Tuesday, FBI Special Agent Robert Plumb said Lieber, who led a Harvard research group focusing on nanoscience, had established a research lab at the Wuhan university — apparently unbeknownst to Harvard. […]

The arrangement between Lieber and the Chinese institution spanned “significant” periods of time between at least 2012 and 2017, according to the affidavit. It says the deal called for Lieber to be paid up to $50,000 a month, in addition to $150,000 per year “for living and personal expenses.”

This is a lot worse than stiffing your university with a $200K tab for strip clubs and Candy Crush in-app purchases.

Input Interview With Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, Key Members of Original iPad Team ★

Input:

Two people who’ve known the iPad longer than anyone are Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, the married founders of the mysterious new tech start up Humane, who met while working at Apple on the iPad and related projects. For the tenth anniversary of the iPad, Input talked to them about its strange development, its biggest feature flops, and how it has changed the world. […]

Bongiorno: I joined in 2008, actually, right after they shipped the first phone. I joined immediately after that and started as a project manager on the iPhone. There was a very small team back then; we sat kind of in one hallway. [The phone] was definitely a startup within Apple and I was brought on board because the project manager that was working there really didn’t like working with designers and really didn’t like working at the higher levels of the stack. She preferred kind of working at a lower level; the core operating system and the kernel and things like that.

Then very quickly after that, they told me that the real reason they had to hire me was because Steve had this pet project that he was really excited about and they needed somebody to lead that effort because the team really needed to remain focused on development of iPhone. They needed to kind of spin up a startup within a startup that would be a small team to build this new project codenamed K48.

Good interview. Can’t wait to see what Humane is doing.

Walt Mossberg on the iPad’s 10th Anniversary ★

Walt Mossberg:

People focus on the fact that iPad unit sales peaked a few years ago. But they forget that:

iPad sales took off faster than iPhone sales.

It’s likely that over 300 million iPads have been sold.

By annual revenue, if the iPad were a company, it would be on the Fortune 500.

I think the big factor with iPad sales peaking so early is two-fold. First, they soared early because the iPad filled a heretofore unfilled space. Post-iPhone, people got what the iPad was immediately and they wanted one. Sales then declined (but have leveled off in recent years), I think, because iPads last so long, and a years-old iPad still does all the things most people want from an iPad very well.

The 10th Anniversary of the iPad: A Perspective From the Windows Team ★

Fascinating insight on the launch of the iPad from Microsoft’s perspective, from Steven Sinofsky, who was then in charge of Windows:

The first looks and reviews a bit later were just endless (and now tiresome) commentary on how the iPad was really for “consumption” and not productivity. There were no files. No keyboard. No mouse. No overlapping windows. Can’t write code!

In a literally classically defined case of disruption, iPad didn’t do those things but what it did, it did so much better not only did people prefer it but they changed what they did in order to use it. Besides, email was the most used tool and iPad was great for that.

‘Brute Force’ ★

Armin Vit, writing at Brand New:

Last week, Trump introduced the official logo for the United States Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. military. The internet was quick to point out its similarity to Star Trek’s Starfleet logo which, yes, but also @jbillinson mentioned similarities to the NASA logo so I figured I would check and, yup, they copy-pasted the orbit swoosh and most of the star configurations. […] What a joke.

This administration can’t even do a logo right.

Ben Smith Leaves BuzzFeed News for The New York Times ★

Mihir Zaveri, writing for The New York Times:

Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, who built a hard-hitting news operation within a digital media organization better known for clickbait and listicles, will be The New York Times’s next media columnist.

Mr. Smith will leave the digital news outlet to replace Jim Rutenberg, who recently became a writer at large at The Times, splitting duties between the politics desk and The Times Magazine. Before Mr. Rutenberg, the columnist position was held for years by David Carr, the prolific media columnist who died in 2015.

A few months back on my podcast, Dan Frommer observed that contrary to his and my longstanding expectation that the internet would enable startup media outlets to thrive, in the last few years there’s been a concentration of talent at a handful of standard-bearing newspapers: the Times in particular, but also the the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

EFF: Ring Doorbell App for Android Is Packed With Third-Party Trackers ★

Bill Budington, writing for the EFF:

Ring isn’t just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers.

An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Four main analytics and marketing companies were discovered to be receiving information such as the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers.

This is sort of nuts. Isn’t a doorbell camera the sort of product that obviously demands more attention to privacy from the company that makes it? Third-party trackers are a privacy scourge in any app, but a doorbell camera seems like one of the last apps that should contain them. (The EFF’s investigation only mentions the Ring app for Android — no word on what trackers are in the iOS app — it’s a good bet its chock full of trackers too, though.)

Seems like every week there are new disturbing disclosures about Ring. Were these egregious security, privacy, and law enforcement issues part of the company culture before Amazon bought them, or because Amazon bought them? And why does Amazon, of all companies, need third-party trackers at all?

Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2020 first quarter ended December 28, 2019. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $91.8 billion, an increase of 9 percent from the year-ago quarter and an all-time record, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $4.99, up 19 percent, also an all-time record. International sales accounted for 61 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Looking at the details for year-over-year net sales:

iPhone: +7.7%
Mac: -3.5%
iPad: -11%
Wearables: +37% (!)
Services: +17%

In dollars, Wearables accounted for $10B in sales, Mac $7.1B, iPad $6B. A year ago those three categories were all roughly tied at around $7B. Apple Watch continues to grow and AirPods are simply a sensational hit.

How to Disable Multitasking on iPadOS 13 ★

Apple support document:

To turn Multitasking features on or off, go to Settings > Home Screen & Dock > Multitasking, then you can do the following:

Allow Multiple Apps: Turn off if you don’t want to use Slide Over or Split View.

Picture in Picture: Turn off if you don’t want to use Picture in Picture.

Gestures: Turn off if you don’t want to use Multitasking gestures to see the app switcher, return to the Home screen, and more.

A slew of readers pointed to this after I said I’d prefer iPhone-style one-app-at-a-time multitasking to the convoluted easy-to-make-a-mistake/hard-to-correct-a-mistake split-screen and Slide Over multitasking in iPadOS. iPadOS supports an option that more or less does this — the “Allow Multiple Apps” option mentioned above.

I’m aware of no other graphical user interface that offers a setting like this. The existence of this setting — and that it is not tucked away under Accessibility — feels like proof that Apple knows iPad multitasking is often invoked by accident and can be confusing.

Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop ★

When the Mac shipped in 1984 developers had to use a Lisa to write apps for it. When the iPad shipped in 2010 developers had to use a Mac to write apps for it.

In late 1986 Apple shipped MPW, which allowed Mac software to be written on a Mac. In 2020, developers have to use a Mac to write apps for iPad.

My Review of the Original iPad ★

Yours truly, back in April 2010:

After the iPad was announced, I got two types of emails from readers. The first group saying they were disappointed, because they had been hoping I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

The second group wrote to tell me how excited they were because I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

Count me in with the second group. Apple hasn’t thought of everything with iPad, but what they’ve thought about, they’ve thought about very deeply. I got mine Saturday morning, and I’ve been using it since — or at least as often as I could get it away from my son. Here are my thoughts.

Nothing hammers home for me just how long 10 years is more than looking at that photo.

The whole thing feels fast fast fast. The only thing that feels slow overall, so far, is web page rendering. Not because it’s slower than the iPhone — it’s not, it’s definitely much faster — but because it’s so much slower than my MacBook Pro. It’s easy to forget on modern PC-class hardware just how computationally expensive HTML rendering is.

The funny thing is, the iPad, in raw CPU terms, is a far slower machine than a modern Mac. But the iPad is running a lightweight OS and lightweight apps. It’s like a slower runner with a lighter backpack who can win a race against a faster runner wearing a heavier backpack.

Ten years later, iPadOS is still significantly lighter weight than MacOS, but Apple’s custom-designed ARM CPUs are faster than the Intel chips in MacBooks.

iPadOS Multitasking Without Using the Dock ★

Jordan Merrick, two years ago:

As some iOS 11 users have pointed out, one alternative to this is to invoke Spotlight to search for apps, though this requires the use of an external keyboard to show Spotlight while an app is still active. Another option is to create a folder of apps and place it in the Dock, though this still means you’re still limited to a selection of apps you can multitask from.

So I was wrong yesterday when I wrote that the only way to get a second app on screen is to drag it from your Dock. But one of the other two ways to do it requires an external keyboard to be connected. The other way, jiminy:

There is another way of multitasking apps that doesn’t require using the Dock at all, allowing you to one-handedly drag any app from your Home screen and place them in Slide Over or Split View. You can even use this process to replace any app in a pairing.

Press the Home button to go back to the Home screen.

Tap-and-hold an app until you can drag it around.

Either:
Tap to select another app and launch it from the Home screen.

Invoke the App Switcher (either by swiping up from the bottom of the screen or double-pressing the Home button).

You can then drop the app in Slide Over or Split View, or replace either app in the pairing.

The first of the “either” steps no longer works in iPadOS 13 — once you start dragging an app from the homescreen, tapping another app doesn’t launch it, it adds the tapped app to the app you started dragging in a stack. So the only way now is the second option, sliding up to enter the multitasking spaces view while still holding onto the app icon you’re dragging.

This is so convoluted, so undiscoverable, so easy to make a mistake with, that it proves my point that the multitasking interaction model on iPadOS is a shambles. Just try doing this while holding your iPad in your hand, not resting it on a table. It’s like playing Twister with your hands. This reads like a joke and in practice it’s worse than it sounds. It’s embarrassing.

Ben Packard:

Over the weekend I launched Mezzanine, a new theater diary app for iOS. Mezzanine is the first app I have launched since the introduction of Sign in with Apple, so I was interested to see how popular it would prove with users. The short answer: for Mezzanine users, Sign in with Apple is much more popular than using any other social account, and about as popular as using an email address.

I just used Sign In With Apple for the first time a few weeks ago, and was surprised at how easy it was. I kept waiting for the “confirm your email address” email to arrive but it never did — because there isn’t one. It’s utterly private, where signing in with Google or Facebook is not at all, yet far more convenient than signing up with your email address.