Linked List: December 14, 2020

Monday, 14 December 2020

Raymond Wong Reviews Fitness+ 

Raymond Wong, writing for Input:

I’ll never make the cover of Muscle & Fitness magazine, but my once skinny frame is more defined and toned than it was pre-COVID-19. Let me be clear: I don’t enjoy working out at home. I do it because it’s a daily routine that boosts endorphins to keep me sane. Looking good is secondary to feeling good, which I’d argue is more important during the pandemic than before.

With my mindset, I was not expecting much from Fitness+, Apple’s new fitness subscription service ($9.99/month, $79.99/year, or bundled with Apple One Premier for $29.95/month) that pairs an Apple Watch with video workouts delivered on an iOS device or Apple TV. “Great, Apple is trying to reinvent the Jane Fonda workout tapes my mom used to watch in front of the CRT,” is what I thought at first.

Many Apple Fitness+ workouts later, I am hooked. It’s not just that Apple’s hired a bunch of attractive and fit trainers draped in immaculate Nike activewear to coach you through various workouts (there’s no shortage of those on YouTube), but that the fitness routines and the coaching are actually fun.

Apple’s messaging makes clear that Fitness+ was designed to be welcoming, fun, and scalable from newcomers to fitness experts. The reviews strongly suggest they nailed it. It reminds me of Apple’s computing platforms — the way the iPhone and Mac are intended to be great for experts and non-experts alike, and that non-experts can get into it and grow to become experts.

Todd Haselton Reviews Apple Fitness+ 

Todd Haselton, writing for CNBC:

Fitness+ is excellent. Should you pick it over Peloton? Tough call.

This is the part of a review is where I’d normally say if you should buy something or not, but both Fitness+ and the Peloton app come with free one-month trials. And anyone who bought a new Apple Watch this year gets a three-month trial. So, really, you should try both and see which one you like better. I’m pretty torn right now.

If the biggest downside is that Fitness+ requires you to own an Apple Watch — a sentiment echoed by Nicole Nguyen in her Fitness+ review for the WSJ (News+ link) — it’s not really much of a downside at all. I don’t think it’s a streaming fitness service that’s forcing you to buy a $200-300 watch; I think it’s more like a $10/month fitness service for Apple Watch owners. Apple is very up-front about the “requires an Apple Watch” aspect of Fitness+. It’s like saying the downside of Apple Arcade is that you need an iPhone or iPad to play the games.

One interesting technical note: on Apple TV, the Fitness app will look for Apple Watch wearers in the same room, making it seamless for multiple members of the same family to work out using a shared TV (albeit one at a time). This integration between the Apple TV hardware and Apple Watch even works on anyone’s Apple TV, so if you’re at a friend or family member’s house, or at a public facility with Apple TV, you can work out with Fitness+ as you, with your activity history and settings, without taking over as the signed-in iCloud/iTunes account system-wide on the Apple TV. That’s pretty cool.

‘Listen Up, Georgia’ 

Fun but important video from my friends at Sandwich. Georgians to Georgians, with a simple message: vote. (Early voting in the Senate runoffs started today.)

Yours Truly Talking About Apple Silicon on CNBC’s Squawk Alley With Jon Fortt This Morning 

What I like about these short appearances on CNBC is that they get it — Jon Fortt especially. When they were coming out of the commercial break before my spot, they played clips from Steve Jobs announcing the PowerPC-to-Intel Mac transition back in 2005, with an emphasis on Jobs’s remarks on performance-per-watt, and Apple not being able to build the then-future Macs they were imagining with the chips on the PowerPC roadmap. It’s the exact same story today. But there’s a big fundamental difference this time: now the superior platform is proprietary to Apple.

Wesley Hilliard, writing for AppleInsider:

Ecosia is a search engine that promotes privacy first and plants trees around the world, and with Mondays updates, it is now available as a default search engine setting on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

Ecosia uses their income from search ads to fund planting trees around the world in harsh environments. The search engine doesn’t track users, encrypts searches, and anonymizes data within a week of it being created. The ad revenue generated from Apple users alone have planted over seven million trees in 2020, and now you can do more by making it the default search engine. The website shows over 115 million trees have been planted as a result of search revenue so far.

I’ve lost track of how many years ago I switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo. I suspect a lot of you have never even tried switching away from Google for default search, just out of inertia, and perhaps a general sense that whatever Google’s faults, any other web search probably just plain sucks.

I wouldn’t hesitate to switch back to Google for default search if using DuckDuckGo sucked. Your mileage, of course, may vary, but the key is that however profound it may sound to change your default search engine, it’s actually one of the very easiest technical changes you can make in your computing life. It takes 30 seconds to switch and 30 seconds to switch back if you decide you don’t like it.

I actually hadn’t heard of Ecosia before, but their story is interesting enough that I’m giving them a shot. It’s so easy to switch.

The Knuckleheads’ Club 

The Knuckleheads’ Club:

In the fall of 2018, we noticed that there was something that set Google apart from other big tech companies. Everybody was talking about how to regulate these tech companies, and everybody had pretty good plans for how to do it — for every company besides Google. In our opinion, it was because nobody really seemed to understand what Google does, or how they do it. So, for the past two years, we’ve been researching and analyzing Google. Through this work, we’ve found some really compelling evidence about what powers Google’s monopoly, so much so that Congress referenced this work as part of their recently released Big Tech Antitrust Report. The big ideas that we have is that that crawling the web is a natural monopoly, that Google has control of that monopoly, and that once you understand why this is true and what it means it becomes pretty clear about what sorts of regulations should be taken to reign in Google’s power over the internet.

From their About page:

The reason why it is called the Knuckleheads’ Club is because only a bunch of knuckleheads would try and take on Google.

Daisuke Wakabayashi, reporting for The New York Times:

Google and Microsoft are the only search engines that spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually to maintain a real-time map of the English-language internet. That’s in addition to the billions they’ve spent over the years to build out their indexes, according to a report this summer from Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority.

Google holds a significant leg up on Microsoft in more than market share. British competition authorities said Google’s index included about 500 billion to 600 billion web pages, compared with 100 billion to 200 billion for Microsoft.

The size of the index is valuable, of course, but I’d argue that it’s not the best comparison point. It’s an easy comparison, because you can just compare numbers and say 500–600 billion is bigger and better than 100–200 billion. But I’ll bet the overwhelming number of searches are completely satisfied by the contents of pages indexed by Bing. It’s the quality of results that matters most. A 500 billion-page index is useless if it doesn’t surface the correct results.

What’s more interesting to me is that while there are a number of small search engines, Google and Bing are the only two comprehensive indexes. DuckDuckGo, for example, syndicates the contents of its index from Microsoft. Google has a monopoly on web search no matter how you look at the market, but there’s even less competition for indexing the web than there is for user-facing search engines. In fact, I think semantically it sort of breaks the engine in “search engine” — the term presupposes that the service showing you the results is the same service that is crawling the web to index them. That’s just not true today.

When Mr. Maril started researching how sites treated Google’s crawler, he downloaded 17 million so-called robots.txt files — essentially rules of the road posted by nearly every website laying out where crawlers can go — and found many examples where Google had greater access than competitors.

ScienceDirect, a site for peer-reviewed papers, permits only Google’s crawler to have access to links containing PDF documents. Only Google’s computers get access to listings on PBS Kids. On Alibaba.com, the U.S. site of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, only Google’s crawler is given access to pages that list products.

I don’t think any of this exclusivity is the result of nefarious deals between the websites and Google — these sites have just determined, on their own, that it makes financial sense to only permit Google to index their content.