The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
7:00pm Tuesday  •  California Theatre
Tickets Available  •  Fun Will Be Had

Linked List: April 28, 2024

Sunday, 28 April 2024

WorkOS 

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, supporting SSO, SCIM, user management, and RBAC.

Recently, WorkOS acquired Warrant, the Fine Grained Authorization (FGA) service for developers. Warrant’s product is based on Zanzibar, the open source authorization system originally designed by Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases.

WorkOS is already used by hundreds of high-growth startups like Vercel, Webflow, Plaid, and Perplexity.

If you are looking to build enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, or RBAC, consider WorkOS. It’s a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free.

M4 Chips in New iPad Pros? 

Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg:

Earlier this month, I broke the news that Apple is accelerating its computer processor upgrades and plans to release the M4 chip later this year alongside new iMacs, MacBook Pros and Mac minis. The big change with the M4: A new neural engine will pave the way for fresh AI capabilities. Now here’s another development. This year’s Macs may not be the only AI-driven devices with M4 chips.

I’m hearing there is a strong possibility that the chip in the new iPad Pro will be the M4, not the M3. Better yet, I believe Apple will position the tablet as its first truly AI-powered device — and that it will tout each new product from then on as an AI device. This, of course, is all in response to the AI craze that has swept the tech industry over the last couple years.

This would be a delightful surprise, but I have to say this makes no sense to me, especially given that in the very same column Gurman reiterates that Apple originally hoped to unveil these new iPads in March. The M3 generation of chips only debuted in November. The M3 MacBook Airs only debuted in March, when, according to Gurman, Apple had hoped to ship these iPads. How does that make any sense?

I have no doubt that Apple is poised to promote a slew of “AI” features across its platforms. But is the message at WWDC going to be that this year’s OS releases will bring new AI-powered features to all Apple devices — existing and new — or only to brand-new devices? Gurman is saying it’s the latter, but what are these “fresh AI capabilities” that require an M4, rather than just run a little faster on an M4?

Also, while Apple’s M-series chips have not yet settled into any sort of predictable pattern — as I wrote last week — Apple silicon has been on a very predictable annual schedule since 2011 or so. That’s when the iPhone 4S shipped, with the A5 chip, and new generations of A-series chips have appeared in September or October every single year since. Every generation of M-series chip has been developed alongside a corresponding generation of A-series chips. The M3 chips are the M-series siblings of the A17 Pro. The M4 generation chips, presumably, are siblings to the A18, which we presumably won’t see until the iPhones 16 launch in September.

Even putting aside the rumor — from Gurman himself! — that these new iPads were originally slated for March, it just seems highly unlikely that M4 chips are ready to go in May, just 6 months after the M3 debuted and 8 months after the A17 Pro. And it just doesn’t make sense that Apple would put them in iPad Pros first when they just launched MacBook Airs with the M3. It makes sense for the iPhone to get the first crack at each new generation of Apple silicon, because the iPhone is the most popular line of computers ever made. It makes sense of the Mac to get new M-series generations shortly after new iPhones, because the Mac is Apple’s workstation platform. It makes little sense for a new generation of Apple silicon to debut in iPads.

M4 iPads next week feel about as realistic as those flat-sided Series 7 Apple Watches that Gurman reported three years ago. So I’d bet money against this. In some sense it’s a can’t-lose bet — either I’m right and these iPad Pros will have M3 chips, or Apple’s silicon game is racing far ahead of what I considered possible, which would be rather amazing. Am I nuts or is no one else even skeptical about this?

David Heinemeier Hansson on the Framework 13 Laptop 

Speaking of fascinating perspectives, here’s David Heinemeier Hansson, who recently switched from Mac, on the Framework 13 laptop:

Those are all the good parts, but there are plenty of drawbacks too. Compared to a modern MacBook, the battery is inferior. I got 6 hours in mixed use yesterday. The screen is only barely adequate to run at retina-like 2× for smooth looking fonts. Linux is far less polished than macOS. But somehow it just doesn’t really matter.

First of all, 6 hours is enough for regular use. If I’m doing more than that in a single stint without getting up, I’ll be paying for it physically anyway. And the somewhat cramped resolution has made me fall in love with full-screen apps again, like I used to do with that 11” MacBook Air.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Mac-vs.-Wintel rivalry was the tech rivalry. Other rivalries came and went — like Netscape-vs.-IE, Word-vs.-WordPerfect, Quark-vs.-Pagemaker, C-vs.-Pascal — but the main event was always Mac-vs.-Wintel. When the smartphone revolution occurred that rivalry was eclipsed by iPhone-vs.-Android. But it’s still there.

I’m fascinated following DHH’s switching saga. And my personal devotion to and reliance upon MacOS is such that, if the best-available MacOS-running laptop I could find got me only 6 hours of battery life, I’d accept it. I certainly remember getting less than 6 hours of battery life with a PowerBook. I specifically remember when it was dicey whether you could get through a coast-to-coast flight using a fully-charged Mac laptop. I lived. But nowadays, I wouldn’t fret boarding a coast-to-coast flight with my MacBook Pro only half-charged.

Apple silicon has spoiled me. I don’t even turn the display brightness down when running my MacBook Pro on battery power. I literally just don’t worry about it. It’s like two competing alternative universes when it comes to performance-per-watt. Presumably that’s what Microsoft seeks to change with Windows-on-ARM and these imminent new Surface laptops based on new chips from Qualcomm.

Paul Thurrott Reviews the 15-Inch M3 MacBook Air 

Paul Thurrott, writing at his eponymous website:

Ultimately, I concluded that this isn’t just about looks, though that obviously plays a role. Instead, it’s a sum of its attributes, the total package. It’s the feeling of incredible lightness, given its size, when I pick it up to move to another room. The way it can sit on a bed or other soft surface and never get too hot or fire up some loud fans that aren’t even necessary or present in this device. How the battery just lasts and lasts and lasts, and makes a mockery of other companies’ “all-day battery life” claims.

It’s the little things, like effortlessly opening the lid with one finger and seeing the display fire up instantly every single time. Or the combination of these daily successes, the sharp contrast with the unpredictable experience that I get with every Windows laptop I use, experiences that are so regular in their unpredictableness, so unavoidable, that I’ve almost stopped thinking about them. Until now, of course. The attention to detail and consistency I see in the MacBook Air is so foreign to the Windows ecosystem that it feels like science fiction. But having now experienced it, my expectations are elevated.

I want to be clear about this. There is nothing like this in the PC space. Any laptop that’s configured such that it can handle workstation-class workloads will fire up jet engine-class fans for the duration, while any laptop that gets decent battery life and is reasonably quiet is incapable of those higher-end workloads. The MacBook Air does it all, in silence, without breaking a sweat. And it does so all day long on battery power.

Fascinating perspective. Spot-on review.

Local Note: ‘McGillin’s Bartender John Doyle Marks 50 Years at Philly’s Oldest Bar’ 

Stephanie Farr, writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer (News+):

But his big break came when the downstairs bartender broke a bottle over an unruly customer’s head (the patron had reached behind the bar to serve himself). Doyle had to cover the bar when his coworker was hauled out by police in handcuffs.

And that’s how Doyle, 79, a married father of two and grandfather of four, came to be the longest-serving bartender at Philly’s oldest-operating bar. This month marks 50 years for Doyle at McGillin’s, which opened on Drury Street near 13th in 1860, and in true Philly fashion, the bar is throwing a yearlong party in his honor.

If you ever visit McGillin’s — and you should if you can — their exclusive McGillin’s 1860 IPA is the beer to order. Good food too. Back when I was in college they had some sort of ridiculous Friday night wings special — 100 wings for $10? — that never ceased to seem too good to be true.