Linked List: November 2, 2022

Wednesday, 2 November 2022

Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, writing for the WSJ:

One of the first employees hired by Ive was a full-time writer. (There are now more than 30 employees, many of whom worked with him at Apple.) Ive says LoveFrom is the only creative practice he knows of to have an on-staff scribe whose job is, in part, to help conjure into words the ideas that his team of graphic designers, architects, sound engineers and industrial designers come up with for its collaborations with Airbnb, Ferrari and others.

Interesting profile, but only insofar as I think it would be nearly impossible to write a profile of Ive that wasn’t interesting to some degree.

Austin Mann’s iPhone 14 Pro Camera Review ★

I should have linked to this a month ago, but better late than never.

iPhone 14 Pro Camera Review: A Small Step, a Huge Leap — Lux ★

Sebastiaan de With, writing for the Lux blog (the makers of Halide):

I took the iPhone 14 Pro on a trip around San Francisco and Northern California, to the remote Himalayas and mountains of the Kingdom of Bhutan, and Tokyo — to test every aspect of its image-making, and I have to say that I was pretty blown away by the results of the main camera.

While arguably, a quad-bayer sensor should not give true 48-megapixel sensor resolution as one might get from, say, a comparable ‘proper’ digital camera, the results out of the iPhone 14 Pro gave me chills. I have simply never gotten image quality like this out of a phone. There’s more here than just resolution; the way the new 48 megapixel sensor renders the image is unique and simply tremendously different than what I’ve seen before.

Inspiring and informative.

Factory Run by Foxconn Placed Under Total COVID Lockdown in China ★

Duncan DeAeth, reporting for The Taiwan News:

Chinese authorities in Zhengzhou on Wednesday (Nov. 2) placed the world’s largest iPhone assembly site, run by Taiwan’s Foxconn, on lockdown in response to a local COVID outbreak.

The move to quarantine the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone follows reports that employees have been fleeing to escape the restrictive environment over the past few days. Placing the factory under a “static management” policy, a euphemism for total lockdown, also comes a day after reports that Foxconn plans to decrease production at the facility over the coming months.

Reuters:

China ordered an industrial park that houses an iPhone factory belonging to Foxconn to enter a seven-day lockdown on Wednesday, in a move set to intensify pressure on the Apple supplier as it scrambles to quell worker discontent at the base. The Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone in central China said it would impose “silent management” measures with immediate effect, including barring all residents from going out and only allowing approved vehicles on roads within that area.

I don’t have much to say about this other than that it feels like a situation worth keeping an eye on.