Linked List: January 29, 2020

Wednesday, 29 January 2020

Behind the Scenes on Apple’s Aperture Team 

20-year Apple veteran Chris “cricket” Hynes, on the origins of Aperture. Just an amazing and rare perspective on how things work — or last worked, past tense — inside Apple. The whole thing is just enthralling, but I’ll share a few nuggets:

I want to inject more levity into this interlude. Randy was always hilarious when he went on a rant. One of my favourites was when he ranted about flowcharts. He despised them. He went so far as to saying that anyone that makes a flowchart should be fired. We all thought it was funny!

The other rant was when we brought in some guy to write the red-eye filter. Since everyone was so busy, they just let him loose. It worked reasonably well when finished. But Randy discovered C++ code, despite the entire project being in Objective-C. Again, he went on a massive rant about how stupid that was, and Apple should fire anyone that writes C++ code. I somewhat agree.

Another:

One of my favourite stories involves an unnamed engineer that joined the team as one of the 130+ borrowed engineers. He was arrogant and was very vocal that every engineer on the original team sucked. At that point, I was running the bug review meetings. He’d stand in the back. When a bug came on screen, his typical response was ‘That code is shit, it needs to be rewritten’.

One day, a bug he wrote came up on the screen. Everyone in the room was scratching their heads about his poorly written bug. It was vague, rambling, and incoherent. So I said ‘this bug is shit, it needs to be rewritten’. Everyone in the room laughed but him. He seemed to redden.

Also, a few anecdotes about long-ago little birdie leaks to yours truly.

Jason Snell’s Notes on Apple’s Latest Record Quarter 

Jason Snell:

Apple’s wearables business is clearly successful and growing rapidly, as expressed in the Wearable/Home/Accessories category’s rapid growth. It was $10 billion in revenue for that category this quarter, up 37 percent from the year-ago quarter and marking 12 straight quarters of 20+% growth.

Apple provided a few fun tidbits in its description of what’s going on inside the Wearable/Home/Accessories bundle. Apple Watch set a new revenue record, though Apple won’t say what that record is. Perhaps more interesting even than that, the company claimed that 75 percent of Apple Watch purchases were from people who were new to the product.

75 percent new customers is a huge number, and suggests strongly that Apple Watch has come nowhere close to peaking yet. Not surprising to me, though. Most people will buy an Apple Watch and wear it for years.

Apple Watch sales aren’t all about the Series 5, either. Cook said that Apple couldn’t make enough of the $199/$299 Apple Watch Series 3. That’s a fascinating tidbit, because it suggests that — like the iPhone SE before it — Apple underestimated the amount of demand that its customers might have for a lower-priced, entry-level product. At $199, the Apple Watch Series 3 is priced similarly to a bunch of other fitness trackers — and it seems to have found some traction there.

Also not surprising to me at all, except for the fact that Apple didn’t accurately forecast demand. Of course the Series 3 is going to be insanely popular: that $200 price point is a major threshold for what typical people think a good watch should cost. I wouldn’t be surprised if come September, the Series 3 stays around for another year and drops to $149/179 (for 38/42mm), but $199/229 is a great base price.