Linked List: November 30, 2022

Wednesday, 30 November 2022

Oceanic+ App for Apple Watch Ultra Launches ★

Apple Newsroom has a long feature story on Oceanic+, an app that turns Apple Watch Ultra into a serious dive computer, and which was previewed extensively during the Ultra’s introduction:

“One of our first goals was to keep it intuitive,” says [CEO] Mike Huish. “People who know how to use an Apple Watch already know how to use this dive computer, because it’s telling them things in a simple format they can understand. The navigation menus are simple — scrolling with the Digital Crown and using the Action button, you can navigate and use all the functionality of the dive computer while diving.”

Recreational scuba diving is a niche, but people who are into it are really into it. I think that’s why Apple partnered with Huish Outdoors (makers of Oceanic+) while the Ultra was in development. With diving, it was essential to partner with a company divers already know and trust.

Icon Speedruns: Flag and Pushpin ★

New YouTube channel from designer extraordinaire Marc Edwards. I could watch stuff like this all day. I just love watching someone who’s good at what they do, do what they do.

Reed Albergotti: Kinda Smart on Apple and China, Kinda Dumb on Green Bubbles ★

Reed Albergotti, formerly of The Washington Post, now writing for Semafor, in a piece with the clickbait headline “Apple’s Chinese Dream Is Over”:

China is also no longer cheap. Wages have skyrocketed, with the average factory worker making $6 per hour on average in 2020, up from less than a dollar in 2006. The average wage of a Chinese factory worker will very soon surpass the U.S. federal minimum wage. For comparison, the average rate for a Mexican factory worker has stayed stagnant at $2 per hour.

If that isn’t the most damning thing I’ve read about the U.S. federal minimum wage, I don’t know what is.

If any company can make the monumental shift away from China, it’s Apple. Its robust supply chain is the reason it was able to keep output going after the 2011 flooding in Thailand disrupted component makers. And it’s why Apple saw only minor product shortages during the height of the pandemic. The chip shortage that crippled Detroit automakers was a blip for Apple’s customers.

But it will cost billions and take years.

The biggest question is whether it will be the same Apple when the process is over. Will the new Apple be stronger and even more resilient? Or will it be unable to recreate the magic of China’s boom years?

It’s a good take on Apple’s increasingly more uncomfortable reliance upon China, but I wouldn’t write about it in the past tense yet.

Bonus content: Albergotti’s bottom-of-the-column take on Elon Musk’s griping about the App Store:

Epic Games can probably commiserate. Musk’s complaint is a pivotal factor in the antitrust lawsuit Epic filed against Apple in 2020. A federal appeals court will soon rule on the case’s outcome.

Albergotti’s description omits the fact that last year’s initial ruling in Epic v. Apple was overwhelmingly in Apple’s favor, including ruling that the App Store does not constitute a monopoly. Anything can happen on appeal, of course, but I’m not aware of anyone serious who expects the appeals court to overturn anything significant in the case.

European regulators also aren’t fans. They’ve forced Apple to get rid of the proprietary Lightning charging port on its phones and threatened to force Apple to open up iMessage (goodbye green bubbles).

Again with the past tense for things that haven’t happened yet, like Apple shipping an iPhone without a proprietary charging/data port.

And the EU’s possible mandate for messaging service interoperability is technical nonsense that reminds of Hugo Rifkind impossible-to-beat description of Brexit: “The thing is, the best way to understand Theresa May’s predicament is to imagine that 52 percent of Britain had voted that the government should build a submarine out of cheese.”

But even if it were possible for Apple, WhatsApp, and whatever other services would fall under the EU’s mandate to comply, what would that have to do with the green bubbles Messages renders for SMS messages? SMS is an example of messaging service interop from Apple. If Apple somehow did connect Messages to WhatsApp, surely WhatsApp messages would be rendered in some color other than blue.

NBC News: ‘The Inside Story of Trump’s Explosive Dinner With Ye and Nick Fuentes’ ★

I’m quite sure many of you are sick of Donald Trump and actively avoid reading about him. But you’ll enjoy this exquisite story on how he wound up having dinner last week with an outspoken racist and antisemite. Marc Caputo, reporting for NBC News:

“I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with,” Yiannopoulos told NBC News. “I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end,” he added.

And, Yiannopoulos said, he arranged the dinner “just to make Trump’s life miserable” because news of the dinner would leak and Trump would mishandle it.

Fuentes echoed the sentiment: “I hate to say it, but the chickens are coming home to roost. You know, this is the frustration with his base and with his true loyalists.”

Trump fumed afterward that Ye had betrayed him by ambushing him. “He tried to f[uck] me. He’s crazy. He can’t beat me,” Trump said, according to one confidant, who then relayed the conversation to NBC News on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

“Trump was totally blindsided,” the source said of Fuentes’ presence. “It was a setup.”

I don’t know about their steaks, but Mar-a-Lago clearly serves nothing but the finest schadenfreude.

WSJ: ‘Elon Musk’s Boring Company Ghosts Cities Across America’ ★

Ted Mann and Julie Bykowicz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

That fall, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan was standing at a fenced-off site affixed with Boring signs near Fort Meade and telling a videographer to “get ready” for a high-speed train from Baltimore to Washington. Mr. Hogan declined to comment.

An aide to Mr. Hogan toured a parking-lot test site at the company’s then-headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport, getting a look at a tunnel-boring machine the company purchased secondhand. Boring named it Godot, the title character in Samuel Beckett’s play about a man who never shows up.

The Republican Hogan administration sped up the bureaucratic process for Boring, granting a conditional permit in October 2017 and an environmental permit a few months later. All Boring had to do was bring its machine and start digging, former Maryland officials said. But months, and then years, passed. Maryland was waiting for Godot.

Boring deleted the Maryland project from its website last year.

As Scott Lemieux quipped, The Boring Company appears to be “basically vaporware that exists solely to undermine actually potentially viable mass transit proposals”. The pitch to local municipalities — helmed by politicians with no engineering expertise — is just the monorail gag from The Simpsons but underground.

‘How the Wordle Editor Is Ruining Wordle’ ★

Lizzie O’Leary, writing for Slate:

Look: I’m sure that Tracy Bennett, the Wordle editor, is a lovely person and a skilled crossword editor. But when I do a Wordle and discover I’ve walked into someone else’s pun, I feel foolish. The butt of a middlebrow dad joke. I want to tell Joe Kahn that the Times’ ever-expanding dominion should leave some room for serendipity and strangeness in the world.

No more puns, I beg of you, Wordle queen. I now understand that you started your reign on November 7 with BEGIN. Please: It’s time to CEASE.

I saw the Times’s announcement that they’d hired a Wordle editor, but I didn’t realize she was playing puns until the Thankgiving solution was FEAST. I had that one down to *EAST and guessed BEAST first, thinking it wouldn’t be FEAST on Thanksgiving. And when I realized it was, I was furious. Yes, that’s right, I got furious at a free word game.

Count me in with O’Leary — however central puns are to good crossword puzzles, they have no place in Wordle.

The Financial Times: ‘Twitter’s $5bn-a-Year Business Hit as Elon Musk Clashes With Advertisers’ ★

Hannah Murphy, Alex Barker, and Arjun Neil Alim, reporting for The Financial Times:

Multiple top advertising agencies and media buyers told the Financial Times that nearly all of the big brands they represent have paused spending on the social media platform, citing alarm at Musk’s ad hoc approach to policing content and decision to axe many of its ad sales team.

Musk, meanwhile, has sought to personally call chief executives of some brands that have curbed advertising in order to berate them, according to one senior industry figure, leading others to instead reduce their spend to the bare minimum required so as to avoid further confrontation with the billionaire entrepreneur.

Planters’ Mr. Peanut mascot isn’t this nutty. The only way to keep advertisers on board is to make Twitter a place where they’d want their ads to appear. Berating CEOs is only going to make Twitter seem less attractive.

After several waves of job cuts and departures, Twitter’s ads business team has shrunk so much that many agencies no longer have any point of contact at the company and have received little to no communication in recent weeks, according to four industry insiders.

Some brands have been unable to get feedback on how previous campaigns have performed because of the staffing shortages, one media buyer said. Others are complaining Twitter’s ads systems have also become buggy, making it difficult or even impossible to run campaigns.

I’ve mentioned before that big brand advertisers are very conservative. They value stability and predictability, and loathe controversy and chaos. That alone would be enough to explain why Twitter’s ad sales have quickly plummeted under Musk’s leadership. But another huge aspect to brand advertising are personal relationships. Musk, to date, has screwed all of this up. He’s made Twitter itself unpredictable and controversial, and he fired the ad sales people who had personal relationships with Twitter’s most important advertisers.

Tim Cook Hosts Elon Musk at Apple Park ★

A little birdie told me Cook was walking around campus with Musk a few minutes ago, but unsurprisingly, Musk himself broke the news. As the saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Update: “Diplomacy” is clearly Tim Cook’s middle name.

‘Ivory’ – In-Development Mastodon Clients for iOS and Mac From Tapbots ★

Tapbots, on Mastodon:

Hello people of the Fediverse! Some of you may have heard that a new Mastodon client, Ivory, is in development for iOS (and Mac!). This is true! Tapbots is going all in on Mastodon and we hope this place continues to grow and thrive. Tweetbot will continue to be developed alongside Ivory as a lot of code is shared. A new Mac version of Tweetbot and Ivory are also currently in development and we are working hard on getting those towards a public beta state.

Huzzah. There are some decent iOS Mastodon clients already, but none for the Mac.

The Apple TV’s Upgrade Experience Needs an Upgrade ★

Jason Snell, writing a few weeks ago at Six Colors:

One Home Screen is a nice feature, but it’s not an iCloud backup of your Apple TV, nor is it the Apple TV equivalent of Migration Assistant. It is exactly what its name suggests — a home-screen-syncing feature and nothing more.

So after setting up my new Apple TV, I then had to log into every single streaming app. And I’ve got a lot of streaming apps — you know, for my work. [...]

The end result was that I spent almost half an hour setting up this new Apple TV to work with the stuff my old Apple TV worked with. There’s got to be a better way! Yes, I know authentication is difficult, and even iOS migrations tend to lose certain connections with outside services. But right now, I’m not seeing any attempt by Apple to make migration easier.

Snell and I talked about this on Upgrade this week. It’s undeniably a pain in the ass, and the people it affects the most are those of us who use Apple TV the most. Either you bite the bullet and re-sign in to all your streaming apps at once, or you do it one at a time, as needed, and waste a few minutes of would-be leisure time each time you first launch one of these apps. What makes it frustrating is knowing how good Apple’s migration process is for setting up a new iOS device or Mac.