Linked List: September 8, 2022

Thursday, 8 September 2022

The Steve Jobs Archive 

This new site, launched by Jobs’s family and friends, is just lovely. So simple, so moving.

Update: The serif typeface for the site is one of LoveFrom’s bespoke fonts, suggesting, unsurprisingly, that Jony Ive was deeply involved in the design.

Ben Thompson: ‘The Services iPhone’ 

Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery:

The most surprising announcement of all, though, were the prices. Everything stayed the same! This was not what I, or close followers of Apple like John Gruber, expected at all. After all, Apple’s strategy the past several years seemed to be focused on wringing more revenue out of existing customers. More importantly, the last year has seen a big increase in inflation.

What this means is that in real terms Apple’s products actually got cheaper. Apple did, to be sure, raises prices around the world, but this is better explained by the fact the company runs on the dollar, which is the strongest in years; to put it another way, those foreign prices are derived from the U.S. price, and that price stayed the same, which means the price is lower.

Jason Snell: ‘Underestimating Apple’s Bold Moves’ 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Which brings us to the Dynamic Island, a stark reminder about the limits of rumors emerging from Apple’s hardware supply chain. Everyone who reported on the size and shape of the new cutouts on the iPhone 14 Pro models was absolutely right — and yet couldn’t see the forest for the trees. The cutouts were only the start of the story.

Leaks from inside Cupertino are a lot harder to come by. And so we missed the bigger picture, which is that Apple took the reduced size of its sensor cutouts as an opportunity to redesign a big portion of the iOS interface. (Remember, it’s been five years since the iPhone X introduced the stable peninsula that we call the notch. That was the first cut at this sort of interface; the company’s had half a decade to think about its next move.)

It was pretty fun that so much hadn’t leaked about yesterday’s news, and the Dynamic Island is at the top of that list.