Linked List: March 24, 2022

Thursday, 24 March 2022

E.U. Legislation to Mandate Sideloading Is Nearing Completion, But Details Remain Unknown ★

Sam Schechner and Tim Higgins, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

The new European Union legislation — which could be effectively completed as soon as this month — is set to direct Apple to allow software to be downloaded outside its cash-generating App Store and limit how companies impose their own payment systems on apps, according to people involved in the negotiations. Failure to comply would carry penalties of up to tens of billions of dollars.

Not the sort of fines Apple can just pay from the loose change in Luca Maestri’s couch.

Rivals and critics of Apple’s power hope the EU law will serve as a catalyst for other jurisdictions, such as in the U.S., where similar legislation is pending before Congress.

“Apple is playing 5D chess right now,” said Paul Gallant, a policy analyst for Cowen & Co. “It will struggle to explain why government changes will radically change the iPhone when Google already does it and it will struggle to explain why it can’t do it in the United States when it may soon do it in Europe.”

What a dumb quote. First, what the hell is the fifth dimension? It’s like he was going to say “4D chess” — which itself is a poor metaphor, given that regular chess is complex enough and takes place in two dimensions — and decided to give it some extra oomph. Second, the iPhone is different from Android. It is true that the fact that Android supports sideloading doesn’t seem to adversely affect typical Android users, but one of Apple’s core arguments against legally mandated sideloading is that it would remove from the market a choice to buy devices where sideloading is not possible. Third, no one from Apple has ever once argued that they “can’t” enable sideloading on iOS because that’s obviously nonsense. They don’t want to enable it.

The full effect of the sideloading provision isn’t yet clear as lawmakers work on final language defining security exceptions that could give Apple leeway to limit the scope of sideloading.

That’s really the rub.

Eliot A. Cohen: ‘Ukraine Is Winning’ ★

Eliot A. Cohen, writing for The Atlantic:

The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. The failure of almost all of Russia’s airborne assaults, its inability to destroy the Ukrainian air force and air-defense system, and the weeks-long paralysis of the 40-mile supply column north of Kyiv are suggestive. Russian losses are staggering — between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective. And there is no reason to think that the rate of loss is abating — in fact, Western intelligence agencies are briefing unsustainable Russian casualty rates of a thousand a day.

Along similar lines, see this interesting Twitter thread from Levi Westerveld about how The New York Times’s graphics desk has evolved their cartography over the last month to better illustrate the state of Russia’s invasion.

John Roach, Spearhead of the TRS-80 Personal Computer, Dies at 83 ★

Sam Roberts, writing for The New York Times:

He was instrumental in prodding Tandy to venture into the computer market. At the time, most small computers were sold as kits to be assembled by hobbyists, but Mr. Roach believed that consumers would welcome a model that they just needed to plug in.

His team presented the original TRS-80 prototype — cobbled together from a black-and-white RCA monitor, a keyboard and a videocassette recorder — to Tandy’s chief executive, Charles Tandy, and to Lewis Kornfeld, the president of RadioShack, in January 1977.

The Apple 1 had been introduced the year before, and Commodore and other companies were marketing their own home computers, but the TRS-80 (the initials stood for Tandy RadioShack) quickly became, for a time, the most popular computer on the market.

“Charles blew a little smoke and said, ‘Build a thousand and if we can’t sell them, we will use them in the store for something,’” Mr. Roach recalled in remarks to the Fort Worth Executive Round Table last month. “We were finally able to ship some machines in September and shipped 5,000 that year, all we could assemble,” Mr. Roach said. “Our competitors shipped none.”

The links in the passage above are not to be missed, including this 1977 Times story on home computers. But the last one is the most interesting — it’s a YouTube video of a speech Roach gave just last month. He’s funny as hell. Glad to see he was active and sharp right up to the end.

As a kid, the TRS-80 was, for whatever reason, the personal computer I had the least exposure to. I had friends with Commodore 64’s and my school had a bunch of Texas Instruments TI-99/4A’s and a precious handful of Apple II’s, but to my recollection I only ever saw a TRS-80 when I was inside a Radio Shack. But you can be damn sure when I did, I played with it until my parents dragged me out of the store.

Display Analyst Ross Young Thinks a 15-Inch Consumer MacBook Is Coming ★

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

The full report is limited to those in the display industry who subscribe, but display analyst Ross Young provided a bit of color on what can be expected. Apple is working on a MacBook Air that’s somewhere around 15 inches in size, with the machine set to debut alongside a “slightly larger” 13-inch MacBook Air.

According to Young, the larger-sized 15-inch MacBook Air is slated for release in 2023, but a specific launch date unknown. This is not the first time that we’ve heard about a 15-inch MacBook Air, as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said last year that Apple was working on a larger MacBook Air with a 15-inch display size. [...]

Internal Apple emails that came out during the Epic Games v. Apple trial also indicate that Apple considered a larger 15-inch MacBook Air as early as 2008, but instead went with the smaller 13-inch model.

Out of all the devices Apple could make but doesn’t, the one that I think might prove the most popular is a big consumer MacBook. Apple has never made a 15-inch or larger laptop that wasn’t a pro-specced and pro-priced MacBook Pro or PowerBook. Surely there are a lot of people out there who would buy a MacBook Air with a 15-inch display if one existed. Plus, now that the latest MacBook Pros have gained a wee bit of thickness and weight in the interest of better serving pro users’ needs, there’s room for a thinner, lighter large-display MacBook to stand out. But why wait for 2023? I’d love to see such a thing appear later this year, when M2 MacBooks are unveiled.

The current MacBook Air (13 inches) starts at $1000. The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2000. The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2500. So the missing MacBook is a 15-inch MacBook Air that starts at $1500. There must be some number of 16-inch MacBook Pro buyers who really do buy them just to get the big display, and they’d spend around $1000 less if a large-display consumer MacBook were available. But I can’t help but think Apple could make up for the lost revenue from those customers by upselling more MacBook Air buyers on a larger screen.

“The largest display option is only available in the pro models” is true for iPads and iPhones too, of course. But rumors strongly suggest that the iPhone 14 will appear with 6.1- and 6.7-inch sizes in both the Pro and non-Pro models. A big-screen non-Pro MacBook would follow that same pattern.