Linked List: January 24, 2024

Wednesday, 24 January 2024

‘Insanely Great: The Apple Mac at 40’ Panel Discussion 

The Computer History Museum:

On the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh’s launch, CHM celebrates one of the most iconic and impactful products ever created. Members of the original hardware, software, design, and marketing/PR teams including Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Andy Cunningham, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, Susan Kare, Dan’l Lewin, and Mike Murray, as well as insiders and experts Chris Espinosa, Guy Kawasaki, Steven Levy, and David Pogue, share stories and discuss the impact of the Mac.

Streaming live as I type this sentence, 7pm Pacific / 10pm Eastern.

Steven Levy: ‘Apple Shares the Secret of Why the 40-Year-Old Mac Still Rules’ 

Steven Levy has a great piece at Wired commemorating the Mac’s 40th anniversary, including interviews with a slew of Apple executives:

For the past few years, the form factors of Macintoshes have been fairly stable. Could a Mac in the future look totally different, as when the iMac morphed from a basketball to a lamp?

“There’s definitely the possibility for a revolution in the future,” says Molly Anderson, a leader in industrial design at Apple. “When we start a new project, we don’t start by thinking of the constraints of how popular our existing products are. We’re always focused on trying to design the best tool for the job.” Joswiak adds that it has taken courage to keep changing the Mac to keep it on the forefront — always, of course, in a deliberate fashion. “The road to tech hell is paved by people who do things because they can, not because they should,” he says.

Jony Ive told me once that one of Apple’s guiding principles was never to make changes for the sake of change alone. If an idea doesn’t make the product better, they don’t do it. If that means some products only change radically in form factor once or twice a decade, so be it. Good design should stand the test of time.

Levy also includes an excerpt from a piece he wrote for Rolling Stone on the original launch:

If you have had any prior experience with personal computers, what you might expect to see is some sort of opaque code, called a “prompt,” consisting of phosphorescent green or white letters on a murky background. What you see with Macintosh is the Finder. On a pleasant, light background, little pictures called “icons” appear, representing choices available to you. A word-processing program might be represented by a pen, while the program that lets you draw pictures might have a paintbrush icon. A file would represent stored documents — book reports, letters, legal briefs and so forth. To see a particular file, you’d move the mouse, which would, in turn, move the cursor to the file you wanted. You’d tap a button on the mouse twice, and the contents of the file would appear on the screen: dark on light, just like a piece of paper.

This seems simple, but most personal computers (including the IBM PC) can’t do this.

“When you show Mac to an absolute novice,” says Chris Espinosa, the twenty-two-year-old head of publications for the Mac team, “he assumes that’s the way all computers work. That’s our highest achievement. We’ve made almost every computer that’s ever been made look completely absurd.”

Espinosa might be the only person at Apple who can say “40th anniversary? That’s nothing.”

‘Show Me More Macs’: Every Macintosh Ever Made 

Jonathan Zufi:

To celebrate this milestone, mac40th.com showcases every Macintosh desktop and portable Apple has ever made with hundreds of the photos taken as part of the work creating the coffee table book ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation (3rd edition now available up to date as of the end of 2023). The site also includes photos taken by Kevin Taylor, Forest McMullin and others (including video) that I’ve collected over the past 14 years.

The site is easy to use: you’ll see a continuous stream of random Macs - just keep clicking ‘Show me more Macs’ and that’s what you’ll get. If you’re a hard core Mac fan, this site should keep you busy for a very long time.

Beautiful.

Harry McCracken on the Original Macintosh 

Harry McCracken, writing at Fast Company:

The most celebrated part of that original Mac was its software interface, which brimmed with new ideas, despite the lazy conventional wisdom that it merely imitated work done at Xerox’s PARC lab. But at the moment, I’m most fascinated by its industrial design. That petite all-in-one beige case, created by Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama, was unlike anything anyone had seen until then — at least outside of a kitchen. [...]

But if all the first Mac inspires is nostalgia, we’ve lost sight of how daring it was. Unlike Apple’s first blockbuster PC, the Apple II, it had a built-in display but no integrated keyboard. It also sacrificed most of the Apple II’s defining features, such as its dazzling color graphics and expansion slots.

In retrospect, it’s among the gutsiest gambits Apple ever made. Imagine the company introducing a new smartphone that has virtually nothing in common with the iPhone. You can’t — or at least it strains my imagination.

That’s what kept me from getting the Mac until I owned one. The Apple II defined what I thought of as a computer, and because the Mac didn’t resemble the Apple II in any way — it didn’t even have a compatibility mode to run Apple II software — it seemed like something else to me. An appliance of some sort, not a computer.

Turns out it was the best concept for a computer anyone has ever devised.

Jason Snell: ‘The Mac Turns 40’ 

Jason Snell, writing for The Verge:

Twenty years ago, on the Mac’s 20th anniversary, I asked Steve Jobs if the Mac would still be relevant to Apple in the age of the iPod. He scoffed at the prospect of the Mac not being important: “of course” it would be.

Yet, 10 years later, Apple’s revenue was increasingly dominated by the iPhone, and the recent success of the new iPad had provided another banner product for the company. When I interviewed Apple exec Phil Schiller for the Mac’s 30th anniversary, I found myself asking him about the Mac’s relevance, too. He also scoffed: “Our view is, the Mac keeps going forever,” he said.

Today marks 40 years since Jobs unveiled the original Macintosh at an event in Cupertino, and it once again feels right to ask what’s next for the Mac.

The subhead on Snell’s piece at The Verge nails it:

Apple’s longest-running product is an increasingly small part of the company’s business. And yet, it’s never been more successful.

Over at Six Colors, Snell has more from an interview with Greg Joswiak, and, separately, a deep dive looking back at the major eras of the Mac’s history, dividing them by processor architecture. From that piece:

The IBM PC and the emerging DOS PC clone standard weren’t the only enemies here. Plenty of other platforms existed in the early days, including the one that generated most of Apple’s revenue, the Apple II.

History tends to flatten everything into simple narratives, so you might expect that the moment the Mac was introduced, Apple began pivoting away from the Apple II. That did not happen. Apple didn’t discontinue the last Apple II model until nearly a decade into the Mac’s existence. After the Mac was introduced, Apple kept introducing new Apple II models: The compact IIc three months later and the 16-bit IIGS more than two years later.

The Mac was a curiosity for me, growing up in the 1980s — intriguing, but it was the Apple II platform that had my attention (and heart) at the time. Then, when I finally got my first Mac in 1991 (a Macintosh LC with 4 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard disk), I got it. It was like turning on a light in a dark room. I finally understood.

Jon Stewart Is Returning to ‘The Daily Show’ 

Angela Yang and Diana Dasrath, reporting for NBC News:

Longtime viewers of “The Daily Show” will soon see a familiar face back in the hosting chair. Jon Stewart, who hosted the show from 1996 to 2015, will return to the program, NBC News has confirmed. [...]

Stewart will host Monday nights through the 2024 election, and then will continue on as executive producer for every episode until the end of this year and the next, according to a news release from Comedy Central. On days Stewart is not hosting, “The Daily Show” will continue to rely on a team of rotating correspondents.

The best TV news I’ve heard in a long while. The problem with The Problem With Jon Stewart on Apple TV+ was that the show was boring. The Daily Show with Stewart hosting was never boring.

Spotify Reveals Its Plans for the Post-DMA Era of Sideloading in the E.U. 

Spotify:

For years, even in our own app, Apple had these rules where we couldn’t tell you about offers, how much something costs, or even where or how to buy it. We know, pretty nuts. The DMA means that we’ll finally be able to share details about deals, promotions, and better-value payment options in the EU. And an easier experience for you means good things for artists, authors, and creators looking to build their audiences of listeners, concert-goers, and audiobook-loving fans. What’s more? All of this can now come without the burden of a mandatory ~30% tax imposed by Apple, which is prohibited under the DMA.

Spotify’s assumptions about how sideloading is going to work on iOS are clearly at odds with the description of Apple’s plans from The Wall Street Journal today. The Journal did not state what percentage commission or fees Apple plans to collect, but it sounds like Spotify thinks they’re going to offer an iOS app through which they won’t pay Apple anything at all for in-app transactions. Their blog post has a series of before-and-after screenshots, and the “after” screenshots show a purchasing flow that doesn’t involve any of the warnings or scaresheets Apple has required for the “reader” app entitlement, Dutch dating apps, or the new External Purchase Links entitlement.

Spotify even plans to run their own app store, with multiple apps. (It seems unclear if the Spotify app store for iOS would host games and apps from other developers, or only a suite of apps from Spotify itself.)

Spotify more or less assumes they’ll be free from all Apple restrictions and commissions, and feels free to lambast Apple’s policies as “pretty nuts” and “ridiculous”:

It should be this easy for every single Spotify customer everywhere. But if you live outside certain markets, you will continue to encounter frustrating roadblocks because of Apple’s ridiculous rules.

We don’t know Apple’s plans yet, but will soon. But it sure sounds like Apple and Spotify have completely different and utterly incompatible interpretations of what the DMA requires. Seems like one side or the other is in for a big surprise.

The Wall Street Journal on Apple’s Plans for iOS Sideloading in the E.U. 

Aaron Tilley, Salvador Rodriguez, Sam Schechner, and Kim Mackrael, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Meta Platforms, Spotify and other companies are preparing new download options for customers in anticipation of the new rules. Meta is considering a system that would allow people to download apps directly from Facebook ads. Spotify plans to offer users the ability to download some of its iPhone apps directly from its website, according to the company. Microsoft has weighed a launch of its own third-party app store for games in the past. [...]

Apple’s approach to the EU law will help ensure the company maintains close oversight of apps downloaded outside the App Store, a process known as sideloading. The company will give itself the ability to review each app downloaded outside of its App Store. Apple also plans to collect fees from developers that offer downloads outside of the App Store, said people familiar with the company’s plans. The company hasn’t yet announced its plans and they could change.

The restrictions and fees could renew tensions with app developers, some of whom had expected the new law to allow them to deliver their apps to users free of Apple’s restrictions or what they see as a high commission. The new European law “is a regulation with teeth, with the possibility to apply fines and with a possibility for the commission to have powers of investigation,” said Olivia Regnier, a senior director of European policy at Spotify.

The Journal story is light on details, but it sounds like Apple is planning for a system largely like last week’s External Purchase Link entitlement, where developers will still be on the hook to pay Apple 27/12 percent commissions. How will this review process work for apps that aren’t distributed through the App Store?

I’ve considered it very odd from the start that the DMA is not clear at all about this. And here we are on the cusp of it going into effect, and we still seemingly have no idea whether the European Commission and Apple see eye to eye on what the DMA demands for compliance.

Clearly, the most strident critics of Apple’s App Store policies believe that the DMA requires opening iOS to something akin to how the Mac works: where the App Store is one method of software distribution, but users are free to simply download apps directly from developers’ websites, so long as those apps are signed. According to the Journal, Apple is planning to announce something not like that at all.

I have a feeling that fireworks are going to fly when Apple announces their compliance plans, but I don’t know. Maybe Apple has shared their plans in detail with the EC and the EC is fine with it. But if that’s the case, I don’t see how the DMA “has teeth” when it comes to sideloading.

Signal Will Cost $50 Million Per Year to Run 

Meredith Whittaker and Joshua Lund, writing for the Signal blog back in November:

Instead of monetizing surveillance, we’re supported by donations, including a generous initial loan from Brian Acton. Our goal is to move as close as possible to becoming fully supported by small donors, relying on a large number of modest contributions from people who care about Signal. We believe this is the safest form of funding in terms of sustainability: ensuring that we remain accountable to the people who use Signal, avoiding any single point of funding failure, and rejecting the widespread practice of monetizing surveillance.

But our nonprofit structure doesn’t mean it costs less for Signal to produce a globally distributed communications app. Signal is a nonprofit, but we’re playing in a lane dominated by multi-billion-dollar corporations that have defined the norms and established the tech ecosystem, and whose business models directly contravene our privacy mission. So in order to provide a genuinely useful alternative, Signal spends tens of millions of dollars every year. We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate — and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

Signal funds itself through voluntary donations. Most of its competitors are funded through advertising. But iMessage is funded through device sales. If it costs $50 million per year to operate Signal, I’d guess it costs Apple more than that to run iMessage.

I know the Beeper thing is last month’s news, but the fact that iMessage costs a lot of money to operate is generally overlooked by those who think Apple should be forced to “open it up”, whatever that might mean.