Linked List: April 28, 2020

Tuesday, 28 April 2020

Joanna Stern Reviews the New iPhone SE ★

“Note: Actual iPhone SE does not talk or have a face” — without question, the funniest video review of the iPhone SE last week. Her column for the WSJ is spot-on too (+), emphasizing that, low price aside, design-wise it is exactly the iPhone a lot of potential buyers are looking for.

Rene Ritchie: iPhone SE vs. iPhone 8 ★

Great idea for a video: just compare the new SE to its near-lookalike predecessor, the iPhone 8. Even if price is your biggest concern, no deal on a new iPhone 8 remaining in channel inventory is a better value than $400 for a new SE in my opinion. For the price-conscious, the fact that the SE has an extra two years of legroom on software updates is a huge factor.

Marques Brownlee Reviews the New iPhone SE ★

Fun, insightful, well-illustrated review, as usual. His review unit was red, naturally.

WSJ: ‘Bill Comes Due for Overextended Airbnb Hosts’ ★

Tripp Mickle and Preetika Rana, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

For years, Cheryl Dopp considered the ding on her phone from a new Airbnb Inc. booking to be the sound of what she called “magical money.” A property she rented out in Jersey City, N.J., on Airbnb could gross more than $8,000 a month, she said, double what long-term tenants would pay.

Now, Ms. Dopp associates the dings with cancellations and financial misery. The 54-year-old information-technology contractor said she had about $10,000 in bookings evaporate overnight in March. She has $22,000 in monthly expenses for a largely Airbnb portfolio, she said, that included another Jersey City home and a house in Miami.

Good apartments have always been hard to find — harder in some cities than others, of course — but Airbnb has consumed many rental markets. $8,000 in Airbnb rentals for a $4,000 apartment is great if you own the apartment, but devastating for local residents looking for, you know, a place to live. In a handful of years, Airbnb went from a service that let you make money from renting out a spare bedroom to a market dominated by speculators.

I don’t blame the speculators for getting while the getting was good. But now that the short-term rental market has completely vanished, I have absolutely zero sympathy for them, either.

(Apple News link for News+ subscribers.)

iPhone SE’s Haptic Touch Doesn’t Work in Notification Center, Apparently by Design ★

A lot of complaints about this, and rightly so, from folks upgrading to the new SE from older iPhones that supported 3D Touch. I didn’t take note of this while reviewing the SE, because I didn’t realize (or remember really) that older phones in the 6/7/8 form factor used 3D Touch for acting on notifications. You can get to the same actions by swiping right to left on a notification and tapping the View button, but still. If the SE supports Haptic Touch at all — and it does — I don’t understand why it wouldn’t support Haptic Touch events for notifications.

There are a lot of small differences between the pre-iPhone-X user interface and post-iPhone-X user interface in iOS. When I first heard about this issue with notifications on the SE, I thought it was something that wasn’t supported in the pre-X interface. But it is — but only on phones with 3D Touch. But the whole thing with 3D Touch and Haptic Touch is so confusing, and has been handled so poorly by Apple in terms of how 3D Touch was used in iOS and which devices had it and which did not (no iPad ever had 3D Touch, for example), that you can’t possibly expect regular iPhone buyers to understand that the reason the new SE doesn’t support long-pressing notifications to act on them is that (a) it has the pre-X Touch ID user interface, and (b) doesn’t have 3D Touch. I’m not even entirely sure that that’s the full explanation for why this is, and it’s my job to stay on top of stuff like this. All I know is that there is only one iPhone in Apple’s current lineup that doesn’t support long-pressing notifications and that phone is the SE, the very newest model, and that doesn’t make sense.