Linked List: September 23, 2024

Monday, 23 September 2024

Nilay Patel’s iPhone 16 Pro Review Addresses the Nilay-Patel-iest of Questions: What Is a Photo? ★

Nilay Patel, writing at The Verge last week:

I asked Apple’s VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack about Google’s view that the Pixel camera now captures “memories” instead of photos, and he told me that Apple has a strong point of view about what a photograph is — that it’s something that actually happened. It was a long and thoughtful answer, so I’m just going to print the whole thing:

Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened.

Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.

And that is why when we think about evolving in the camera, we also rooted it very heavily in tradition. Photography is not a new thing. It’s been around for 198 years. People seem to like it. There’s a lot to learn from that. There’s a lot to rely on from that.

Think about stylization, the first example of stylization that we can find is Roger Fenton in 1854 — that’s 170 years ago. It’s a durable, long-term, lasting thing. We stand proudly on the shoulders of photographic history.

That’s a sharp and clear answer, but I’m curious how Apple contends with the relentless addition of AI editing to the iPhone’s competitors. The company is already taking small steps in that direction: a feature called “Clean Up” will arrive with Apple Intelligence, which will allow you to remove objects from photos like Google’s Magic Eraser.

McCormack’s response is genuinely thoughtful, and resonates deeply with my own personal take. But it’s worth noting that Apple is the conservative company when it comes to generative AI and photography — and yet they’re still shipping Clean Up. I’m not complaining about Clean Up’s existence. I’ve already used it personally. I’m just saying that even Apple’s stance involves significant use of generative AI.

LoveFrom Now Has a Mascot: Montgomery the Bear ★

Mark Wilson, writing at Fast Company:

Now, a full five years later, are we meeting the LoveFrom mascot, Montgomery: a bear, paying homage to San Francisco’s Montgomery Street where LoveFrom is headquartered and will soon open its own store.

Montgomery has just appeared on LoveFrom’s website, where it will sniff and follow your cursor, before slowly navigating over the letters of LoveFrom like rocks in a pond.

A lovely mark and even lovelier animation.

Tripp Mickle Profiles Jony Ive and LoveFrom, Confirms OpenAI Partnership for Device ★

Tripp Mickle, writing for The New York Times:

Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman met for dinner several more times before agreeing to build a product, with LoveFrom leading the design. They have raised money privately, with Mr. Ive and Emerson Collective, Ms. Powell Jobs’s company, contributing, and could raise up to $1 billion in start-up funding by the end of the year from tech investors.

In February, Mr. Ive found office space for the company. They spent $60 million on a 32,000-square-foot building called the Little Fox Theater that backs up to the LoveFrom courtyard. He has hired about 10 employees, including Tang Tan, who oversaw iPhone product development, and Evans Hankey, who succeeded Mr. Ive in leading design at Apple.

On a Friday morning in late June, Mr. Tan and Ms. Hankey could be seen wheeling chairs between the Little Fox Theater and the nearby LoveFrom studio. The chairs were topped by papers and cardboard boxes with the earliest ideas for a product that uses A.I. to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.

The project is being developed in secret. Mr. Newson said that what the product would be and when it would be released were still being determined.

I feel like Mickle somewhat buried the lede here. Architectural projects, magnetic buttons, for $2,000 jackets a lovely new typeface, new steering wheels for electric Ferrari sports cars — all of those design projects are interesting. But an OpenAI-powered personal electronic device, with longtime Apple all-stars Evans Hankey and Tang Tan leading the small team? That’s interesting. That’s competing against Apple. That’s complicated given Ive’s legendary history with Apple. It’s further complicated by the fact that most of LoveFrom’s designers came with Ive from Apple. It’s complicated even further by Powell Jobs’s backing of the startup.

Also somewhat interesting to me is the timing of Mickle’s profile. He spoke with Ive and Marc Newson back in June, but the story was published ... the very day after the arrival of Apple’s new iPhones, AirPods, and watches. That timing might have been entirely the choice of the Times. But still, it’s hard not to notice.

And the whole thing is made even stranger given OpenAI’s partnership with Apple to provide “world knowledge” generative AI by the end of this year. Can’t help but think of then-Google-CEO Eric Schmidt being an Apple board member when the iPhone debuted — with built-in system apps for Google Maps and YouTube — while Google was simultaneously building Android to compete.

iOS 18 Messages Bug, Triggered When Sharing an Apple Watch Face, Causes Crash and Data Loss ★

Zac Hall, with a public service message at 9to5Mac:

For now, the bug is triggered when someone replies to a shared watch face in a thread on Messages in iOS 18. The threaded responses feature allows you to have an inline conversation about a specific message that may have been sent earlier in the chat.

If this happens, Messages will repeatedly crash if the user tries to open the conversation in the app. Sending or responding to conversations from other chats directly in Messages is also not easily possible as the app may repeatedly crash.

Once triggered, the bug affects both users. It appears to require responding to the shared watch face from iOS 18. Replying from iOS 18.1 will not trigger the bug.

However, if the user responds in a thread to the shared watch face, Messages will crash on iOS 18.1 beta, iPadOS 18.1 beta, and macOS 15.1 beta as well.

I suspect we’ll see an iOS 18.0.1 update imminently that includes a fix for this. It’s a nasty bug, though.