Linked List: March 19, 2020

Thursday, 19 March 2020

I love this new ad from Apple for the iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard. What’s not to love? Pitch-perfect use of Futura Bold on the title screen, a vaguely Brazil-like dystopian atmosphere to open, and, once the iPad part kicks in, some fun shots of the iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard in action out in the world. (Remember going out in the world?) One thing I noticed: not one appearance of the available-to-order-right-now Smart Keyboard cover — only the coming-in-May Magic Keyboard. The Magic Keyboard is hot; the Smart Keyboard is not.

But speaking of not hot: It’s impossible to miss that MacBooks are just as much the butt of the jokes as any PC. “Do not touch the screen.” “Your computer comes with a standard arrow cursor.” “You must stay within reach of a Wi-Fi signal.” “It does not have a camera; to connect one, refer to your instruction manual.”

I get it, all of these are things that make iPads fun and useful. The Mac can take it — it’s the mature workhorse platform. But it’s a little incongruous coming on the same day Apple launched its best-ever MacBook Air — featuring no touchscreen, no option for cellular networking, and the worst built-in camera in Apple’s product line. And, yes, a standard arrow cursor.

Apple Updates Mac Mini With Double the Storage Capacity in Standard Configurations ★

One more update to the hardware lineup yesterday. No changes to the internals other than storage, though, which is probably why it wasn’t a talking point for Apple. Still though, it’s great to see Mac hardware getting updates like this mid-cycle.

‘I Always Knew That When the End Came, New Yorkers Would Watch It From a Bar’ ★

Pete Wells, writing for The New York Times:

I see two possible futures for restaurants. In one, state and local governments across the country move rapidly to help them survive the closings and get going again when that’s safe. In the other, bankruptcies cascade across the economy, and people are out of work in numbers this country has not seen since the 1930s.

Will a country that is still bitter about bailing out banks and airlines in the last financial crisis be ready to bail out ramen-yas, pupuserias, vegan sandwich counters, dosa vendors and natural wine bars? It depends on whether politicians and the public see the money as handouts to people who made bad business decisions (beginning, I suppose, with the decision to get into the restaurant business) or as a triage measure that will save the life of a national industry with sales of more than $800 billion last year.

Bailouts should go bottom-up this time around, not top-down.

‘The Secret Call to Andy Grove That May Have Helped Apple Buy NeXT’ ★

Fascinating story (written in 2018 — I hadn’t seen it until recently, though) from Chris MacAskill, who was the head of developer relations at NeXT in the 90s:

Sometime later Steve wandered in my office and asked if I thought porting NeXTstep to Intel was a good idea. Awkward. Did he know? I asked if Intel was going to help. Steve said they offered two great engineers to work alongside ours. They thought it could be done in 6 months. We’d have to keep it super secret from the outside world. Could I act as relationship manager?

This wasn’t as strange as it sounded because I was managing the IBM relationship. Steve had licensed NeXTstep for them to use on their workstations years ago and they had a team living at NeXT working on it. We didn’t have much faith in that relationship.

“Hmmm, that sounds like a good idea, Steve. The 66 megahertz 80486 chip?”

“Yeah. Intel’s graphics primitives are shit so it probably won’t be any faster than the 33 megahertz 68040 we’re using now.”

Six months later I carried a beige Intel-based computer from a windowless room to my office, wrapped in a black cover. It was exactly twice the speed of our sexy black machines.

The State of the Restaurant Industry ★

We see it all around us, but here’s the global day-by-day data from OpenTable. It’s a 100 percent shutdown for many cities now. In some sense this is good — this is what we’re supposed to be doing. But it’s still shocking to see. I don’t think anyone has any sense of what the restaurant industry is going to look like when we get out of this. In the meantime, support your favorite places with takeout and delivery orders — which are safe! — and gift card purchases, if you can.

(The OpenTable app has adapted brilliantly — when I open it here in Philly, it’s chock full of delivery and takeout options, and gift cards are prominent too.)

The Joy of Tech: ‘Pandemic Priorities’ ★

My feelings exactly.