Linked List: May 31, 2024

Friday, 31 May 2024

Craig Hockenberry returns to the show. Topics include the upcoming Daylight DC-1 monochrome “e-paper” tablet, more thoughts on the new iPad Pros, and what we expect/hope for from Apple at WWDC. Also: a one-button keyboard.

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How to ‘Object’ to Meta Using Your Content to Train AI Models ★

Tantacrul, on X:

I’m legit shocked by the design of @Meta’s new notification informing us they want to use the content we post to train their AI models. It’s intentionally designed to be highly awkward in order to minimise the number of users who will object to it. Let me break it down.

Each step of the process exhibits one or more dark patterns — and there are an absurd number of steps. Meta at its worst. This exemplifies everything untrustworthy and icky about Meta and AI itself. It’s just gross.

What’s Next for Apple’s Journal App? ★

Ryan Christoffel, writing for 9to5Mac:

However, after seeing what a new third-party autobiography app is doing with AI, I’m convinced Apple could have a blow away moment if it showed off an AI-supercharged Journal app.

The Journal app is a curious offering from Apple. It was first introduced at last year’s WWDC as an iOS 17 feature, but didn’t end up shipping to users until the end of the year in iOS 17.2. In an era where Apple is pushing cross-platform solutions like SwiftUI and Mac Catalyst, Journal debuted as an iPhone exclusive. As a result, you couldn’t (and still can’t) create or even view Journal entries on your iPad or Mac.

If you have a spare iPhone and sign into iCloud, you can see that Journal does in fact sync everything via iCloud with end-to-end encryption. There just aren’t — yet? — versions of Journal for iPad or Mac to sync to. I actually like the focused, super-simple nature of Journal a lot. But it’s damn curious to me that it’s still iPhone-only.

2024 is the Year of AI, so if there is any Journal-related news at WWDC next month, I’m sure some of that news will be about improving the AI-backed suggestions. But Journal is missing some fundamentals that strike me as far more essential:

iPad and Mac apps.
Search.
Import and export.

I worry that import and export aren’t priorities for Apple. Apple Notes can import RTF and plain text files, but its only option for exporting is, bizarrely, PDF — which is a file format Notes can’t import. A good system for import/export would allow for full fidelity round-tripping. You should be able to export to a file or archive format that Notes can also import, without losing any formatting, metadata, or image attachments. Notes doesn’t even try. And if Notes still doesn’t support robust import/export, 17 years after it debuted as one of the original iPhone apps in 2007, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath for Journal.

Search, on the other hand, feels like something Apple must add to Journal. What’s the point of keeping a journal if you can’t search for previous entries? I’d like to see Apple add tagging too — but proper tags, like the ones you can use in the Finder, not gross hashtags like they shoehorned into Apple Notes a few years ago. (I’d love to see Apple reverse course with Apple Notes itself, and change those gross hashtags to proper tags.)

Conceptually I think of Journal as a personal, private social media timeline. Many of my entries are just a sentence or two. I don’t think of entries as days, but rather simply as posts or items. Threads has shown how proper tagging can work with a social media timeline.

‘Guilty’ ★

Jason Kint, on X:

As I’ve said in the past, nothing makes a statement on important news close to the newspaper front page. Across America, almost every editor went with the simple fact, “Guilty.”

Quite the collection of front pages.

Trump and his lickspittles can and will argue that the trial was unjust. The state of New York was against him. The city was against him. The judge was against him. But it wasn’t the state, city, or judge who convicted him. It was a jury of 12 ordinary citizens, chosen jointly by prosecutors and Trump’s own lawyers. That’s the beauty and power of our criminal justice system.

Trump’s not arguing that the jury made a mistake. Nor is he arguing that this trial, and this trial alone, is corrupt. He’s arguing that the bedrock of our entire system of justice is rigged. That was predictable, but it still takes one’s breath away.

iPhones Pause MagSafe Charging During Continuity Camera, and Might Not Charge Via USB Either ★

Adam Engst, writing at TidBITS:

Apple seems allergic to saying that an iPhone won’t charge with MagSafe during Continuity Camera. However, it may not charge over USB either. Several users in a Reddit conversation reported that their iPhones lost charge during Continuity Camera sessions, even while plugged in.

I suspect that Continuity Camera taxes the processor sufficiently that the iPhone heats up. (It’s always warm when I take it off the mount after a meeting.) Since MagSafe charging also causes the iPhone to get warm — warmer than USB-based charging — Apple’s battery optimization system may be putting charging on hold to protect the battery from thermal overload. Which is good, if unexpected in the moment.

Cheap Third-Party ‘Lightning’ Headphones Are Often Cheap Bluetooth Headphones ★

Wild story from Josh Whiton, who bought a cheap pair of wired Lightning-connector headphones in Chile, but couldn’t get them to work unless he enabled Bluetooth on his iPhone:

A scourge of cheap “lightning” headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe:

True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery.

They have even made lightning adapters using the same recipe: plug-in power a fake lightning dongle that uses bluetooth to transmit the audio signal literally 1.5 inches from the phone to the other end of the adapter.

Commenters on the thread on X are blaming the supposedly high licensing fees Apple charges for Lightning peripherals, but I don’t think that’s it exactly. I wrote about this back in 2021 — there’s a baseline assumption that Apple kept the iPhone on Lightning as long as it did because (a) it made a lot of money selling its own Lightning cables; and (b) by requiring certified third-party Lightning products to pay a stiff licensing fee.

But go search for “Lightning cables” on Amazon. You can buy Lightning USB cables for $1 apiece in bulk. Temu sells them for under $1. These cheap cables probably aren’t up to spec or officially licensed. But they are cheap. It doesn’t really matter what the actual licensing fees from Apple are, because these knockoff cable makers wouldn’t pay them anyway.

I think the problem these cheap manufacturers are solving isn’t that Lightning is expensive to license, but that it’s difficult to implement for audio. Actual Lightning headphones and headphone adapters have a tiny little digital-to-analog converter (DAC) inside the Lightning plug. It’s like a little computer. Doing it with Bluetooth and using the Lightning plug only for power is surely easier. It’s just lazy. But it’s kind of wild that the laziest, cheapest way to make unofficial “Lightning” headphones is with Bluetooth.

This makes me wonder though: do dirt-cheap USB-C headphones work the same way, or do they tend to include a DAC for actual wired playback?