Linked List: May 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.

Thursday, 30 May 2024

Kino 1.0 ★

New from Lux, makers of Halide:

Today we’re excited to launch Kino, a powerful filmmaking app for beginners and experts alike. As say they say in screenwriting, “Show, Don’t tell,” so let’s walk through a few of the tent-pole features in our huge 1.0 release. [...]

Last fall, everything changed when Apple introduced “Log” video support on the iPhone 15 Pro. When recording in this format, your iPhone saves a version of your video with most of the original information, and before any creative decisions have been applied. Using that cake analogy, it’s like the iPhone now saves all the ingredients that make up a cake, but leaves you to do the baking.

That’s great if you’re a skilled baker… er… colorist… but it’s challenging for most of us. Out of the box, Apple Log footage looks really flat. It’s not meant to look good. It’s meant to be edited later.

But what if you didn’t have to edit? What if you could use all that powerful extra color data and get a cinematic look with one tap?

What a delightful prosumer balance Kino strikes. Preset color grades include some from Evan Schneider, Tyler Stalman, Stu Maschwitz, Sandwich Video, and Kevin Ong.

And I just adore some of the UI touches in the app, like drawing a big red border around the entire display when recording footage. It’s like those big red lights in TV studios.

Kino is going to cost $20 as a one-time purchase, but is available at launch for just $10. What a great deal.

See also: Lux cofounders Sebastiaan de With and Ben Sandofsky were my guests on The Talk Show back in October, and dropped some hints about what is now Kino.

Lorne Michaels on SNL ‘Best Cast’ Nostalgia ★

Lorne Michaels, a decade ago, as SNL hit its 40th anniversary, and the widespread belief that the show was better “back in the day”:

“Generally when people talk about the best cast I think, ‘Well, that’s when they were in high school,’” said Michaels. “Because in high school you have the least amount of power you’re ever gonna have. ... Staying up with friends later on a Saturday is great, and people attach to a cast.”

Jibes with yesterday’s post on “America’s best decade”.

Gurman: ‘iOS 18 Siri AI Update Will Let Users Control Features in Apps With Voice’ ★

Mark Gurman, with yet another scoop:

The new system will allow Siri to take command of all the features within apps for the first time, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the initiative isn’t public. That change required a revamp of Siri’s underlying software using large language models — a core technology behind generative AI — and will be one of the highlights of Apple’s renewed push into AI, they said. [...]

Siri will be a key focus of the WWDC unveiling. The new system will allow the assistant to control and navigate an iPhone or iPad with more precision. That includes being able to open individual documents, moving a note to another folder, sending or deleting an email, opening a particular publication in Apple News, emailing a web link, or even asking the device for a summary of an article.

This sounds a lot like a large action model, not just a large language model. It makes sense if Apple can pull it off.

In 2018, Apple launched Siri Shortcuts as well, letting users manually create commands for app features. The new system will go further, using AI to analyze what people are doing on their devices and automatically enable Siri-controlled features. It will be limited to Apple’s own apps at the beginning, with the company planning to support hundreds of different commands.

This makes me think that developers will need to support new APIs to describe and define the sort of actions Siri can perform — like Siri Shortcuts but richer, and hopefully easier for developers to support. According to Gurman, this feature isn’t slated to roll out to iOS 18 users until sometime next year. That makes sense, given that the ink seemingly isn’t yet dry on the Apple-OpenAI partnership.

Writing at 9to5Mac, Ryan Christoffel puts it thus:

Presumably, this change will lead to a lot fewer occasions of having you ask Siri to complete a task and finding it has no idea what you’re talking about. A more intelligent Siri that can understand natural language for a much wider array of commands sounds like the Siri we have always expected but never quite got.

That sounds like exactly where Apple’s goalposts should be.

The Information: ‘OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Cements Control as He Secures Apple Deal’ ★

Amir Efrati and Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled; Ars Technica has a good summary):

Now, he has fulfilled a longtime goal by striking a deal with Apple to use OpenAI’s conversational artificial intelligence in its products, which could be worth billions of dollars to the startup if it goes well, this person said.

Aside from the financial windfall such a deal might bring, a partnership with Apple has the potential to boost OpenAI’s position within the tech industry over the long term. Altman and his colleagues hope the Apple partnership might one day supplant a longstanding alliance Apple has with Google, OpenAI’s main rival, which today handles searches on Apple’s Safari browser and is critical to preserving Google’s search monopoly.

While a partnership between Apple and OpenAI has been rumored for months, this report by The Information is the first I’m aware to assert that the deal is official. It’s light on details, to say the least, starting with just who is paying whom and how either company plans to make money from the partnership. Presumably it’ll be Apple paying OpenAI for the privilege of integrating with their expensive-to-run cloud-based servers.

The financial arrangement between Google and Apple for default search, on the other hand, is both simple and lucrative. Google makes money showing ads in search results. Safari drives zillions of users to Google search. Google pays Apple roughly $20 billion per year for that traffic acquisition, while selling ads worth many tens of billions of dollars for those searches. Google makes money and maintains access to the Apple demographic. Apple makes money from Google’s payments. And Safari users get Google Search results by default.

There’s nothing like that with OpenAI, right now. There’s also this:

To top it off, Altman is working on two new projects outside OpenAI: the first is a daring effort to make AI server-chip factories and the other is developing an AI-powered personal device, such as earbuds with forward-facing cameras that could emulate the AI companion in the film “Her,” with the aid of former Apple designer Jony Ive. Both efforts could complement his work at OpenAI — which would own stakes in the ventures — and give him even more clout.

Apple and Google’s friendly relationship — Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt was an Apple board member from 2006 to 2009 — ended when Google changed Android from being an open alternative to Blackberry to being an open alternative to iPhones. OpenAI is — according to multiple reports — not only looking to create its own personal computing devices, they’re considering partnering with Jony Ive and LoveFrom to do it. They’re setting themselves up to be frenemies with Apple before the first partnership is even announced.

Wednesday, 29 May 2024

America’s Best Decade ★

Andrew Van Dam, writing for The Washington Post:

So, we looked at the data another way, measuring the gap between each person’s birth year and their ideal decade. The consistency of the resulting pattern delighted us: It shows that Americans feel nostalgia not for a specific era, but for a specific age.

The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.

I have more nostalgia for the 1990s, when I was in my 20s, than I do the 1980s, but I can see why these answers tend toward the decade of one’s teenage years.

(Via Kottke.)

Sunday, 26 May 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.

Friday, 24 May 2024

Daylight Computer’s DC-1 Tablet ★

New $730 tablet with a sounds-too-good-to-be-true 10.5-inch e-ink-like “e-paper” display that refreshes at 60 fps. Super visible in daylight, amber backlighting at night. Runs a custom version of Android, ships with a stylus, and looks really nice. I jumped on a pre-order.

Om Malik got an early look:

What the company has created is a beautiful tablet — about the size of a normal iPad Air. It is just a “little less than white,” white, with a gorgeous screen. It is very simple, elegant, and lovely. It has an e-ink screen, and the matte monochrome paper-like display is optimized for reading, writing, and note-taking. It refreshes at 60 frames per second, a pretty big deal for e-ink displays. This is much less stressful on the eye and easy to use even in direct sunlight. It has 8 GB memory, about 128 GB in-built storage, an 8-core chip, microphones, speakers, and a powerful battery.

Publishing AI Slop Is a Choice ★

From a New York Times story by Nico Grant, under the headline “Google’s A.I. Search Errors Cause a Furor Online”:

With each mishap, tech industry insiders have criticized the company for dropping the ball. But in interviews, financial analysts said Google needed to move quickly to keep up with its rivals, even if it meant growing pains.

Google “doesn’t have a choice right now,” Thomas Monteiro, a Google analyst at Investing.com, said in an interview. “Companies need to move really fast, even if that includes skipping a few steps along the way. The user experience will just have to catch up.”

That quote is insane. There’s no reason Google had to enable this feature now. None. If their search monopoly has been losing share recently, it’s not because of rivals who are serving up AI-generated slop. It’s because even before this, Google’s search results quality was slipping in obvious ways. This is just making it worse. They’ve turned Google Search — the crown jewel of the company, arguably the greatest consumer product ever made — into the butt of jokes.

LLM-powered search results are a bauble. The trust Google has built with users over the last 25 years is the most valuable asset the company owns. Google most certainly does have a choice, and they’ve chosen to erode that trust just so they can avoid accusations that they’re “behind”.

Behind is where you want to be when those who are ahead are publishing nonsense.

The Talk Show: ‘Canadian Girlfriend Vibes’ ★

Special guest M.G. Siegler returns to the show to talk about the new iPad Pros, the iPadOS/MacOS functional gulf, the OpenAI/Scarlett Johansson controversy, and M.G.’s excellent new blog Spyglass.

Thursday, 23 May 2024

Some Goofy Results From ‘AI Overviews’ in Google Search ★

Asked “how many rocks should i eat” [sic], Google Search responded:

According to UC Berkeley geologists, eating at least one small rock per day is recommended because rocks contain minerals and vitamins that are important for digestive health. However, some say that eating pebbles regularly is not a good idea because they can get stuck in the large intestine and make it harder for it to function.

Ben Collins, newly-named CEO of The Onion, surmises that Gemini got this nutrition info from America’s finest news source.

In another winner, answering “cheese not sticking to pizza”, Google Search suggested:

Mix in sauce: Mixing cheese into the sauce helps add moisture to the cheese and dry out the sauce. You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness.

Maybe don’t eat the pizza at Google’s cafeteria, given that their recipe comes from renowned Reddit chef “fucksmith”. (We’re all rightly dunking on the Elmer’s Glue suggestion, but it’s just as wrong to suggest mixing cheese into the sauce. No one does that.)

Anyway, Apple is behind on AI.

Update: Another one: “No, you can’t use gasoline to cook spaghetti faster, but you can use gasoline to make a spicy spaghetti dish. Here’s a recipe for spaghetti cooked with gasoline...” Gemini gleaned this classic Italian recipe from — wait for it — another AI.

Craig Hockenberry quips: “We’re playing the shittiest game of telephone ever.”

OpenAI Shows Records and Plays Recordings for Washington Post Showing They Really Did Hire an Unnamed Actress to Voice ‘Sky’ ★

Nitasha Tiku, reporting for The Washington Post:

But while many hear an eerie resemblance between “Sky” and Johansson’s “Her” character, an actress was hired in June to create the Sky voice, months before Altman contacted Johansson, according to documents, recordings, casting directors and the actress’s agent.

The agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the safety of her client, said the actress confirmed that neither Johansson nor the movie “Her” were ever mentioned by OpenAI. The actress’s natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice, based on brief recordings of her initial voice test reviewed by The Post. The agent said the name Sky was chosen to signal a cool, airy and pleasant sound.

Joanne Jang, who leads AI model behavior for OpenAI, said that the company selected actors who were eager to work on an AI product. [...] Jang said she “kept a tight tent” around the AI voices project, making Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati the sole decision-maker to preserve the artistic choices of the director and the casting office. Altman was on his world tour during much of the casting process and not intimately involved, she said.

This seemingly clears OpenAI of any suspicion that they were lying about having hired an unnamed actress to provide Sky’s voice, and had actually trained it on recordings of Johansson. I will admit I had my suspicions. (It also speaks to the importance of trusted institutions like the Post.)

But as Tiku elaborates, hiring an unnamed actress to provide the voice doesn’t necessarily get OpenAI out of jeopardy:

He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use. [...]

Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.”

Tom Waits won a similar lawsuit against Frito-Lay in 1990, based on the Midler precedent.

‘&udm=14’: The Disenshittification Konami Code ★

Nice follow-up from Ernie Smith on his post about Google’s humbly-named but somewhat-hidden “Web” search: he made a simple web front-end that redirects searches to Google with the magic &udm=14 parameter appended. Expert users won’t need this site, but typical users might love it as their home page.

Wednesday, 22 May 2024

How to Make Google’s ‘Web’ View Your Search Default ★

Ernie Smith, writing at Tedium:

But in the midst of all this, Google quietly added something else to its results — a “Web” filter that presents what Google used to look like a decade ago, no extra junk. While Google made its AI-focused changes known on its biggest stage — during its Google I/O event — the Web filter was curiously announced on Twitter by Search Liaison Danny Sullivan. [...]

The results are fascinating. It’s essentially Google, minus the crap. No parsing of the information in the results. No surfacing metadata like address or link info. No knowledge panels, but also, no ads. It looks like the Google we learned to love in the early 2000s, buried under the “More” menu like lots of other old things Google once did more to emphasize, like Google Books.

I haven’t tested it extensively but it sure looks like vastly superior search results than Google displays by default. The trick is to append &udm=14 to the end of your Google search URL. Smith documents how to use this URL structure as your default in a Chrome-derived browser, so that you get these “Web” results by default searches initiated from the browser location field. (Which, lo these many years later, remains the modern command line.)

Safari, uniquely amongst popular web browsers, doesn’t allow users to configure custom search engines. There are ways to get custom search engines in Safari using extensions — Kagi, my default search engine of choice since late 2022, does just this — but it’s kludgy. Why doesn’t Safari support adding custom search engines like every other browser does?

On the Mac, I initiate most web searches from LaunchBar, not Safari’s location field, and LaunchBar makes it trivial to add a custom search using this &udm=14 URL trick. Similar utilities like Alfred and Raycast do too. The downside compared to LaunchBar’s built-in Google search action (and Safari’s location field) is that a simple custom query URL doesn’t provide as-you-type suggested results.

Trailer for Marvel’s Intriguing, but Annoyingly-Punctuated ‘What If…? An Immersive Story’ ★

In addition to this immersive VisionOS-exclusive experience from Disney, Apple itself is releasing Parkour, the second episode of its own “Adventure” series, on Friday.

Tuesday, 21 May 2024

Pixar Lays Off 175 Employees, 14 Percent of Staff, Shocking No One Who’s Tried Watching Their Recent Films ★

Samantha Masunaga, reporting for the LA Times:

Walt Disney Co.-owned computer animation studio Pixar is laying off 14% of its staff, as it cuts back on the number of streaming series it produces. The layoffs, which will affect about 175 employees, were signaled as far back as January. [...]

But Emeryville, Calif.-based Pixar, in particular, has also struggled to break out of a pandemic-induced slump at the box office. While the storied studio known for “Toy Story,” “Finding Nemo” and “Up” once churned out hit after hit, its recent performance has been mediocre.

Animated films such as “Toy Story” spinoff “Lightyear,” released in 2022, was a disappointment at the box office, as was 2020’s “Onward.” Last year’s “Elemental” opened with weak ticket sales but managed to recover thanks to strong word-of-mouth reviews.

After Lee Unkrich’s Coco (2017), Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 (2018), and Josh Cooley’s Toy Story 4 (2019), I couldn’t name a Pixar film off the top of my head. After a few duds I stopped watching new Pixar movies automatically and waited for ones that were well-regarded. And I’m still waiting.

The core “Pixar braintrust” is gone — Steve Jobs is dead, Joe Ranft is dead, Ed Catmull retired, and John Lasseter was driven out of the company by scandal. Unkrich left Pixar in 2019. Stanton is still listed as creative vice president, but his most recent Pixar movie was co-writing Toy Story 4. Of the braintrust, only Pete Docter — now Pixar’s chief creative officer, and the director of Monsters, Inc., Up, and Inside Out — remains. Stanton has directed a lot of live action episodic content since Toy Story 4, including Obi Wan for Disney, Better Call Saul, For All Mankind, and the only good episode of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. His next two projects are live action films, Revolver and In the Blink of an Eye. Brad Bird is directing a cool-sounding “retro-futuristic detective story” titled Ray Gunn, with Lasseter producing, but that’s for Skydance Animation, not Pixar.

There’s just nothing special about Pixar any more. Excellence is fragile, and genius talent is rare.

Apple Loosens Core Technology Fee for Hobbyists and Small Developers ★

Apple Developer News, with an item from three weeks ago that I thought I’d already linked to but had not:

Today, we’re introducing two additional conditions in which the CTF is not required:

First, no CTF is required if a developer has no revenue whatsoever. This includes creating a free app without monetization that is not related to revenue of any kind (physical, digital, advertising, or otherwise). This condition is intended to give students, hobbyists, and other non-commercial developers an opportunity to create a popular app without paying the CTF.

Second, small developers (less than €10 million in global annual business revenue) that adopt the alternative business terms receive a 3-year free on-ramp to the CTF to help them create innovative apps and rapidly grow their business. Within this 3-year period, if a small developer that hasn’t previously exceeded one million first annual installs crosses the threshold for the first time, they won’t pay the CTF, even if they continue to exceed one million first annual installs during that time. If a small developer grows to earn global revenue between €10 million and €50 million within the 3-year on-ramp period, they’ll start to pay the CTF after one million first annual installs up to a cap of €1 million per year.

The first item is simple. The second isn’t simple, but still makes the CTF far more palatable, and lower-risk, for small developers. But my main takeaway is that by all outward appearances, it seems like Apple’s DMA compliance plans are holding up, including the CTF. I find the European Commission utterly inscrutable, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that changes. But right now I think what we see from Apple regarding the DMA is what we’re going to get.

Copilot+ Laptops and Stickers ★

A detail that caught my eye in Sean Hollister’s scathing review at The Verge of the MSI Claw, a Steamdeck-like handheld gaming device, is that the device has an ugly “Intel Core Ultra 7” sticker on it. The sticker doesn’t even look like it’s on straight.

This got me wondering if, in the switch from Intel and AMD x86 chips to Qualcomm ARM chips, PCs might finally get away from those ugly stickers that have been littering laptop palm rests for decades. Based on these product shots from Samsung for their Galaxy Book4 Edge, the answer is no. They still have stickers, just different ones. Maybe that’s just Samsung though? The product shots for Microsoft’s other Copilot+ launch partners don’t show stickers.

(Thanks to DF reader Michael Skinner for pointing out Samsung’s stickers.)

Semafor: ‘As Clicks Dry Up for News Sites, Could Apple News Be a Lifeline?’ ★

Max Tani, writing for Semafor:

Like many digital publishers, The Daily Beast was struggling at the end of 2023. Facebook, long a primary driver of clicks to the publication, had turned away from news. Search traffic had become increasingly erratic, as Google adjusted its algorithm to combat a flood of AI-powered junk. The site’s paid subscription program had atrophied since Donald Trump left office.

But it had a new lifeline: Apple.

Late last year, the digital news tabloid (where I worked from 2018 to 2021 as a media reporter) entered into Apple’s partnership program, called Apple News+. The program made all of the publication’s buzziest exclusives available to paying Apple subscribers, behind Apple’s own paywall. And the impact for a mid-sized news site was immediate, putting the Beast on track to make between $3-4 million in revenue this year from Apple News alone — more than its own standalone subscription program, and without much additional cost.

Apple News+ is yet another example of Apple successfully playing long games, with patience and determination. Apple Pay is another example. When it debuted in 2019 Apple News+ was largely written off. But now I’m seeing more and more stories like this, writing about it as a success.

Could be some lessons here regarding knee-jerk no-patience “Apple is late to AI” takes.

Adobe Unveils Firefly-Powered Generative Remove in Lightroom ★

Adobe:

Today, Adobe unveiled Generative Remove in Adobe Lightroom, bringing the magic of Adobe Firefly directly into everyday photo editing workflows across Lightroom mobile, web and desktop surfaces. Generative Remove is Lightroom’s most powerful remove tool yet, giving everyone the power to remove unwanted objects from any photo non-destructively in a single click by intelligently matching the removed area with pixel perfect generations for high-quality, realistic and stunning results. From removing distractions in family photos, to empowering professionals with speedier retouching workflows and more fine-grain control, Generative Remove empowers exciting capabilities for all photographers. Generative Remove is available today as an early access feature across the Lightroom ecosystem for millions of users.

As software ever more dominates the field of photography, Nilay Patel often asks, “What is a photo?”

I’m not exactly comfortable with making removal of people and objects this easy, but I also really want to use the feature myself. The discomfort this causes is exactly in line with the discomfort that Photoshop 1.0 raised in 1990. Generative fill/erase is rising to the level of table stakes. Google launched Magic Eraser in 2021. Adobe’s brief demo video in this press release doesn’t show a professional photographer — it’s a woman shooting photos with her phone. Apple is going to have to add this to Photos, and it ought to be announced next month.

Taking Aim at Apple’s Fanless MacBook Airs With Fans ★

Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica:

One caveat that I hadn’t seen mentioned in Microsoft’s presentation or in other coverage of the announcement, though — Microsoft says that both of these devices have fans. Apple still uses fans for the MacBook Pro lineup, but the MacBook Air is totally fanless. Bear that in mind when reading Microsoft’s claims about performance.

Are any of today’s first batch of “Copilot+ PCs” fanless? If not, can any of them truly be said to have “taken aim” at the MacBook Air?

Acer Swift 14 AI: I couldn’t find any mention of fans or cooling, which makes me think it has fans.
Asus Vivobook S 15: “Plus, dust filters for both fans keep your laptop pristine.”
Dell: No mention.
HP: No mention.
Lenovo: No mention.
Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge: Only mention of “fan”: “Galaxy Book4 Edge also brings fan-favorite features, Chat Assist and Live Translate, to the PC.”

If any of these are fanless, I’d expect that to be a touted feature. If I’m wrong and one or more of these are fanless, let me know and I’ll post an update. But if they’re not fanless, it’s hard to say they’re MacBook Air peers.

Monday, 20 May 2024

Microsoft’s New Flex Keyboard for the Surface Pro Tablet ★

Also from Tom Warren:

The basic silhouette of the hardware hasn’t changed much, save for the new Flex Keyboard attachment. The tablet with an integrated kickstand has been a Surface staple for years now, and Microsoft continues to refine it rather than trying to reinvent it.

I got a chance to try this new Flex Keyboard, and I’m surprised at how much more stable it is than previous models. There’s no noticeable bounce when you’re using it on a desk, and even on my lap, it felt a lot more study than the previous Surface Pro keyboards.

You can even use this keyboard away from the Surface Pro as it automatically switches over to a Bluetooth connection once you undock it. Microsoft has a tiny battery inside the base to enable this and the new haptic feedback on the trackpad in this Flex Keyboard. The haptic feedback doesn’t feel as prominent as on the Surface Laptop Studio 2, but it’s still nice to have inside this new keyboard.

The basic idea of the Flex Keyboard is that it’s like the bottom part of a laptop — an integrated keyboard and trackpad, with a little dock for the included Slim Pen stylus. Unlike Apple’s iPad Magic Keyboard, the Flex Keyboard has a battery and works wirelessly over Bluetooth. I spitballed a similar idea for Apple’s Magic Keyboard on my podcast last month with Federico Viticci.

The appeal of working wirelessly isn’t so much, to my mind, for tablets. I can’t recall ever wishing my iPad Magic Keyboard would remain connected to my iPad over Bluetooth. In fact, I could see that being annoying when I want to use my iPad all by itself, with its on-screen keyboard. There’s a certain “you know what you’re getting” aspect to the fact that the Magic Keyboard is only active when the iPad is magnetically attached. The appeal I see of the Flex Keyboard design would be using it with a headset like Vision Pro. Vision Pro has great support for Bluetooth keyboards and Apple’s Magic Trackpad, but that makes two things you need to carry around with your Vision Pro if you want to use it for productivity. Better would be a single keyboard with an integrated trackpad.

Microsoft can use this design because they’ve steadfastly stuck to their guns on including a kickstand with Surface Pro tablets. Apple has never released an iPad with a kickstand, and almost certainly never will. But without a kickstand on the iPad itself, the Magic Keyboard needs that big cantilevered magnetic hinge to attach and support the iPad, which in turn renders the design unfeasible for pairing with a Vision headset. Even if the new Magic Keyboard had a battery and supported Bluetooth, it wouldn’t be a graceful peripheral for Vision Pro because of the hinge.

So Microsoft has an integrated keyboard/trackpad peripheral that seems perfect for use with a headset, but they only make headsets that no one seems to care about. And Apple has a headset that would be great with an integrated keyboard/trackpad, but their integrated keyboard/trackpad is designed exclusively for the new iPad Pros.

The Flex Keyboard With Slim Pen isn’t cheap, either: $450. A 13-inch iPad Magic Keyboard costs $350 and the Pencil Pro costs $130.

‘Inside Microsoft’s Mission to Take Down the MacBook Air’ ★

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge:

On a recent morning at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft representatives set out new Surface devices equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips inside and compared them directly to Apple’s category-leading laptop. I witnessed an hour of demos and benchmarks that started with Geekbench and Cinebench comparisons, then moved on to apps and compatibility.

Benchmark tests usually aren’t that exciting to watch. But a lot was at stake here: for years, the MacBook Air has been able to smoke Arm-powered PC chips — and Intel-based ones, too. Except, this time around, the Surface pulled ahead on the first test. Then it won another test and another after that. The results of these tests are why Microsoft believes it’s now in position to conquer the laptop market.

Microsoft’s comparison were all against M3 MacBook Air models. Fair enough, insofar as the MacBook Air is by far Apple’s best-selling line of laptops, and the M3 models shipped just two months ago. But the MacBook Airs are fanless. A lot — most? all? I’m not sure — of the new “Copilot+ PCs” Microsoft showed off today have fans. (Or if you prefer, “active cooling systems”.) Microsoft’s own new Surface Laptops have MacBook-Air-esque pricing (13-inch starts at $1,000; 15-inch starts at $1,300) but they weigh about 0.3 pounds more than the equivalent-sized MacBook Air. Those weights puts them more in the class of the M2 13-inch MacBook Pro.

All of this app compatibility and performance is nothing without battery life, though. Microsoft uses a script to simulate web browsing. On 2022’s Intel-based Surface Laptop 5, it took eight hours, 38 minutes to completely deplete a battery; the new Surface Copilot Plus PC lasted three [sic] times that, hitting 16 hours, 56 minutes. That’s an incredible jump in efficiency, and it even beats the same test on a 15-inch MacBook Air M3, which lasted 15 hours, 25 minutes. That’s a whole hour and a half more.

Microsoft ran a similar test for video playback, which saw the Surface Copilot Plus PC hit more than 20 hours in a test, with the MacBook Air M3 reaching 17 hours, 45 minutes. That’s also nearly eight hours more than the Surface Laptop 5, which lasted 12 hours, 30 minutes. If those battery gains extend beyond basic web browsing and video playback, this will be a significant improvement for Windows laptops.

I presume Warren meant that the new Surface Laptop lasted twice as long as the old Intel-based model, not three times as long. But this highlights my main hardware takeaway from today’s event: the M3 MacBook Air served as a good foil/benchmark for all these comparisons — performance, battery, price — but the real comparison was Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite vs. Intel’s and AMD’s x86 offerings.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that today marks the beginning of the end for x86. Either the x86 architecture has reached an inevitable endpoint, or Intel and AMD are just unable to compete talent-wise. (Or both.) But as of today the performance-per-watt gulf between ARM and Intel/x86 is no longer just an Apple silicon thing — it’s now a PC thing too. If there was any chance for Intel or AMD to catch up, it had to happen between the M1’s breakthrough introduction in 2020 and now. But they couldn’t do it.

The saddest part of the event were the cursory appearances — each by pre-recorded video, despite it being an in-person event in Redmond — of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and AMD CEO Lisa Su. Their token appearances felt like Microsoft pretending they haven’t moved on from x86, during an event whose entire theme was, effectively, “moving on from x86”. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is only being compared to Apple’s base M3, so it’s still up to Intel and AMD to offer chips with performance on the level of the M3 Pro and Max, but the writing is on the wall. The future belongs to ARM system architectures.

Microsoft Introduces ‘Copilot+ PCs’ ★

Microsoft today held an event on the eve of their Build developer conference to introduce their new “AI first” class of PCs, which they’re calling Copilot+ PCs. The event video is not on YouTube (yet?), and the URL (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/event) is not a permalink.

The most notable new Windows feature is Recall (which conceptually seems much like Rewind, which has been available as a third-party app for MacOS for a while now):

We set out to solve one of the most frustrating problems we encounter daily — finding something we know we have seen before on our PC. Today, we must remember what file folder it was stored in, what website it was on, or scroll through hundreds of emails trying to find it.

Now with Recall, you can access virtually what you have seen or done on your PC in a way that feels like having photographic memory. Copilot+ PCs organize information like we do — based on relationships and associations unique to each of our individual experiences. This helps you remember things you may have forgotten so you can find what you’re looking for quickly and intuitively by simply using the cues you remember. [...]

Recall leverages your personal semantic index, built and stored entirely on your device. Your snapshots are yours; they stay locally on your PC. You can delete individual snapshots, adjust and delete ranges of time in Settings, or pause at any point right from the icon in the System Tray on your Taskbar. You can also filter apps and websites from ever being saved. You are always in control with privacy you can trust.

Recall can “view” and remember everything that appears on screen because it’s integrated with the Windows 11 graphics system. That’s the sort of “AI feature” that truly benefits from being a first-party solution that can integrate at lower levels of the OS than third-party apps can.

One of the more impressive demos they showed was using Copilot as a voice-driven assistant that helps you cooperatively play Minecraft. The game still gets the entire GPU for graphics because Copilot is running on the NPU.

OpenAI and Sam Altman Ripped Off Scarlett Johansson’s Voice, Supposedly Using an Unnamed Soundalike Voice Actress ★

Scarlett Johannson, in a statement released to several media outlets:

Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.

After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer. Nine months later, my friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named “Sky” sounded like me.

When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference. Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word “her” - a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human.

Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr. Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsider. Before we could connect, the system was out there.

At 11:30pm PT last night, OpenAI tweeted:

We’ve heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, especially Sky. We are working to pause the use of Sky while we address them.

They’ve “heard questions”.

This plays into every bad stereotype about Silicon Valley “tech bros”. I mean, if they had never contacted Johansson and simply hired an actress who sounds like her, to some degree, that’d be one thing. But to negotiate with her to provide her voice officially, and go ahead with a soundalike after she turned down the offer? Some choice: work with them or get ripped off. How in the world did Sam Altman expect to get away with this? One can only presume Altman expected Johannson to roll over, but why would he expect that? She’s the highest-grossing actress in the history of Hollywood, and Hollywood talent isn’t known for rolling over. And Johansson in particular has a reputation for standing up for herself against deep-pocketed companies.

Also, given the mix of arrogance and the tidbit in Johansson’s statement about Altman reaching out again just two days before OpenAI’s demo, does anyone actually believe this “Sky” voice was not trained on recordings of Johansson herself? The best case scenario for OpenAI is that they really did find a soundalike actress, but that whole story has strong “I found a girlfriend this summer but she lives in Canada” vibes.

AI Ambitions vs. Carbon Neutrality Goals ★

Justine Calma, writing for The Verge:

Microsoft’s producing a lot more planet-heating pollution now than it did when it made a bold climate pledge back in 2020. Its greenhouse gas emissions were actually around 30 percent higher in fiscal year 2023, showing how hard it could be for the company to meet climate goals as it simultaneously races to be a leader in AI.

Training and running AI models is an increasingly energy-hungry endeavor, and the impact that’s having on the climate is just starting to come into view. Microsoft’s latest sustainability report is a good case study in the conundrum facing big tech companies that made a slew of climate pledges in recent years but could wind up polluting more as they turn their focus to AI.

The Verge ran this under the headline “Microsoft’s AI Obsession Is Jeopardizing Its Climate Ambitions”, which I think correctly pegs Microsoft’s priorities. I wonder whether for Apple the problem is flipped, and Apple’s climate obsession is jeopardizing their AI ambitions? Apple has not backed off one iota from the goal it declared in 2020 to be 100 percent carbon neutral by 2030. At the time, the Apple Car struck me as the biggest obstacle to that goal. That’s not a problem now that they’ve cancelled Project Titan. But AI strikes me as the new biggest obstacle — a wildcard industry change they didn’t foresee in 2020.

Perhaps the New Ultra-Thin iPhone Rumored for 2025 Is in Addition to, Not Replacing, the iPhones Pro ★

Re: my idle speculation on rumors of a more expensive, thinner-than-ever iPhone 17 model slated for 2025, Ryan Jones writes:

For maybe the first time, I suspect you’re off.

They tried upmarket, iPhone X, it worked. They tried Mini, not enough sales. They tried Plus, not enough sales. Pro Max became most popular.

So what do you do?

Make the Pro Max even bigger (they are, this year, 6.7″ → 6.9″)

cut the “extra” non-Pro phone, smaller didn’t work, bigger didn’t work

go up market again

Thus:

iPhone 18 (6.1″)

iPhone 18 Pro (6.1″)

iPhone 18 Pro Max (6.9″)

iPhone “Ultra” (6.7″)

Oh, I like this thinking a lot. It fits with Apple’s historic strategy. When they try new things and they aren’t hits, they move on. The iPhone 5C was a one-off — no more colorful “beautifully, unapologetically plastic” iPhones. The iPhone Mini only lasted two years (iPhone 12 and 13), and these rumors suggest the iPhone Plus will only last three (iPhones 14, 15, and this year’s upcoming 16).

But when iPhone models prove popular, Apple doesn’t sweep them away. The revolutionary iPhone X, notably, appeared alongside the decidedly evolutionary iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, all three of which phones sported the then-new A11 Bionic chip. Two years ago Apple added the Ultra to the Apple Watch lineup, but only eliminated the titanium “Edition” models of the traditional Watches. It makes all the sense in the world that Apple might create a four-model iPhone family exactly like Jones suggests: keep the regular-sized standard iPhone, keep the Pro and Pro Max, and add a new, thinner-than-ever, more-expensive-than-ever, “Ultra” model at the top. Going upmarket is a strategy that has worked every time they’ve tried in the past. If they sell $2000+ iPads, why not sell $2000+ iPhones? iPhones are more important to more people than any device Apple makes.

Spitball: So how could Apple make an iPhone so thin that, like the new iPad Pros, it’s the first thing people notice about the device? How about getting rid of the glass back? Make the back aluminum or titanium, increasing rigidity, decreasing weight, and eliminating a point of failure for drops. This would require a new method for inductive charging — the whole reason all high-end phones, not just iPhones, have glass backs is that inductive Qi charging doesn’t pass through metal. Maybe something more like MagSafe on MacBooks?

The thinnest iPhone to date was 2014’s iPhone 6, at 6.9mm (not including camera lenses).

‘Pathways’ — New Apple Developer Learning Resources ★

Apple, last week:

Pathways are simple and easy-to-navigate collections of the videos, documentation, and resources you’ll need to start building great apps and games. They’re the perfect place to begin your Apple developer journey — all you need is a Mac and an idea.

Mildly interesting to me that this was announced in May, not at WWDC.

iOS 17.5.1 Includes Fix for Bug That Resurfaced Deleted Photos ★

MacRumors, quoting Apple’s own release notes:

This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.

That’s a nasty bug, so it’s no surprise that 17.5.1 is here just one week after 17.5.0.

Last week MacRumors also reported on a claim that iOS 17.5 was resurfacing photos on devices that had been wiped and resold (or given away), but that was an extraordinary claim that didn’t jibe with our understanding of how “wiping” an iOS device works. All storage on iOS devices is encrypted, and when you wipe the device (Settings → General → Transfer or Reset iPhone/iPad → Erase All Content and Settings), the encryption key is destroyed. The system doesn’t, and doesn’t need to, overwrite the storage with 0’s or random bits. It just destroys the encryption key from the Secure Enclave, rendering the data already written to storage unrecoverable. That report was based on a single post on Reddit, which has since been deleted. (MacRumors has an update appended to that report, but I think they should move that update to the top of the post, not the bottom. All evidence suggests that it was a false alarm.)

Apple’s 2023 App Store Transparency Report (PDF) ★

One segment that caught my attention:

Apps removed from the App Store subject to government takedown demands: 1,462

By country or region:

China mainland: 1,285

South Korea: 103

India: 30

Russia 12

Indonesia: 8

Lithuania: 5

Ukraine: 5

Malaysia: 2

Mexico: 2

Philippines: 2

Thailand: 2

Türkiye: 2

Hungary: 1

Libya: 1

Pakistan: 1

Vietnam: 1

There are footnotes on the China and South Korea numbers. For China it says “There were 1,067 game apps removed for lack of a legally required GRN license.” That’s a 2020 law that requires a government license for any paid game. For South Korea, which one doesn’t think of as a repressive country, it says “There were 102 game apps removed for their inappropriate age rating”, which accounts for all but one of them.

A few other items:

Average weekly app downloads: 787,999,950

Average weekly app redownloads: 1,656,894,821

I long suspected users engage in frequent churn with certain apps installed on their phones, but this seemingly puts a number to it: redownloading previously installed apps is more than twice as popular as downloading new apps. But 788 million weekly app downloads is a big number.

Average weekly automatic app updates: 52,623,848,130

Average weekly manual app updates: 562,782,228

No surprise that automatic app updates dwarf manual updates, given that automatic updates have been the default setting for many years. These numbers indicate there are almost 100× more automatic updates than manual ones. (I update manually, typically each day, because I enjoy perusing the release notes, just in case there’s anything interesting in them. I’m glad Apple still offers manual updates as a setting.)

The Information: ‘Apple Plans a Thinner iPhone in 2025’ ★

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information (paywalled — MacRumors has a summary):

Apple is developing a significantly thinner version of the iPhone that could be released as early as 2025, according to three people with direct knowledge of the project. The slimmer iPhone could be released concurrently with the iPhone 17, expected in September 2025, according to the three people with direct knowledge and two others familiar with the project. It could be priced higher than the iPhone Pro Max, currently Apple’s most expensive model starting at $1,200, they said.

The people familiar with the project described the new iPhone, internally code-named D23, as a major redesign — similar to the iPhone X, which Apple marketed as a technological leap from previous generations and which started at $1,000 when it was released in 2017. Several of its novel features, such as FaceID, the OLED screen and glass back, became standard in subsequent models.

The iPhone X was a true ground-up redesign of the iPhone. No more Home button (replaced by a gestural interface), Face ID, all-screen design with round corners, and more. It effectively created a fork in the platform.

Left unsaid by The Information is how Apple plans to market this new iPhone. I suspect they’re either describing what Apple plans to call the iPhone 17 Pro, or that it’ll have a new name but replace the iPhone Pro in the lineup. That is to say, I do not think Apple plans to make regular iPhone 17’s, 17 Pros, and this new redesigned and more expensive thinner iPhone.

The screen will measure somewhere between the 6.12-inch diagonal display of the standard iPhone and the 6.69-inch display of the iPhone Pro Max, the person added. The rear cameras could be relocated from the upper-left corner of the phone’s back to the top center as part of the redesign, another person with direct knowledge said. [...] Ross Young, CEO at Display Supply Chain Consultants, later said on X that this model would have a 6.55-inch display, which would make it slightly smaller than the iPhone Pro Max.

The Information isn’t coming out and saying there will only be one size, but it sure sounds like that’s the rumor — and that one size is the current Max size. It’s also worth remembering that there was only one size of the iPhone X (5.8 inches) but its 2018 follow-up, the iPhone XS, added the Max size (6.5 inches). Perhaps Apple plans to ship a 5.8-inch-ish smaller iPhone 18 Pro? Or, perhaps, 6.5 inches is the new regular size and an even larger-display iPhone Pro will come in the iPhone 18 generation?

Speaking of larger-sized iPhones, though, The Information says the Plus models are going away:

In recent years, Apple has released four iPhone models. It plans to drop the iPhone Plus, one of its less-expensive models, which has a large screen but lacks the latest-generation processors and cameras, in 2025, three people said. The Plus, which debuted with the iPhone 14 and will still be part of the iPhone 16 lineup this year, has sold below expectations, they said.

Sunday, 19 May 2024

Kolide ★

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring last week at DF. The September 2023 MGM hack is one of the most notorious ransomware attacks in recent years. Journalists and cybersecurity experts rushed to report on the broken slot machines, angry hotel guests, and the fateful phishing call to MGM’s help desk that started it all.

But while it’s true that MGM’s help desk needed better ways of verifying employee identity, there’s another factor that should have stopped the hackers in their tracks. That’s where you should focus your attention. In fact, if you just focus your vision, you’ll find you’re already staring at the security story the pros have been missing.

It’s the device you’re reading this on.

To read more about what Kolide learned after researching the MGM hack — like how hacker groups get their names, the worrying gaps in MGM’s security, and why device trust is the real core of the story — check out the Kolide blog.

Encyclopedia Sasser and The Case of the Forged 1977 Apple Employee Badge ★

My suspicions were immediately raised by the photograph. That’s just not what ID card photographs looked like in the ’70s or even ’80s. But when #8 calls it fake, you know it’s fake. Go home, Bugs Meany.

Tweet URLs Finally Redirect to X.com ★

Only took 300 days. (And, as I noted in a footnote a few months ago, with this change I’ll just call it X, not “Twitter/X”.)

Friday, 17 May 2024

Delta, the Emulator App, Changes Logo After Suggestion From Adobe Lawyers ★

This is one of those stories with no bad guy. Delta’s icon/logo was clearly supposed to represent an uppercase Greek delta (Δ). Adobe’s logo is even more clearly an uppercase A. But Delta’s Δ really does look too much like Adobe’s A. If I were an Adobe lawyer I’d have sent the same letter. (Note that Adobe’s lawyers made no threats and were nice about it.)

What’s funny though is that, taking colors into consideration, Delta’s icon looks more like an upside-down Verge favicon.

Sam Alito Flew Seditionist Flag Outside His House in 2021 ★

Jodi Kantor, reporting for The New York Times:

After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.

One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.

How in the world did this not come to light before now?

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Profile in courage.

Thursday, 16 May 2024

Netflix Strikes Three-Year Deal to Broadcast NFL Games on Christmas Day ★

Henry Goldblatt, writing for Tudum, Netflix’s splendidly named in-house blog:

Netflix has an early Christmas gift for you — but it won’t fit under the tree. On Dec. 25, 2024, we’ll be the global home of the NFL’s two Christmas Day marquee games: the Super Bowl LVII-winning Chiefs vs Steelers and Ravens vs. Texans. And mark your calendar for Christmas Day in 2025 and 2026 when we’ll be streaming at least one holiday game each year as part of this three-season deal.

My two questions:

First, who’s going to announce the games?

Second, how strong a bid did Apple make to get these games?

Samsung Pepsis Its Pants Again ★

Speaking of Apple’s “Crush” ad, Samsung has posted a “response”, depicting a woman guitarist sitting atop a paint-splash-strewn platform standing in for a hydraulic press, with the slogan “We would never crush creativity. #UnCrush”

Rather than sit back and enjoy Apple own-goaling itself last week, they couldn’t resist gracelessly piling on, accomplishing nothing but to remind everyone that they’re Pepsi to Apple’s Coke — content to sit in second place forever, copying not just Apple’s hardware and software designs, but even parodying Apple’s ads. This one is the equivalent of picking ideas out of Apple’s trash. Sad.

Update: This marketing strategy didn’t turn out well for Commodore.

New iPad Pros Perform Well in Bend Tests ★

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

The new iPad Pro is here and the inevitable YouTube stress tests are already online. JerryRigEverything and AppleTrack posted their bend test videos, and both seemingly came to the same conclusion: the new iPad Pro holds up well to extreme force and seems pretty resistant to bending during normal use.

AppleTrack repeated the same bends with the M2 iPad Pro and the new M4 iPad Pro to compare, and whereas the M4 iPad Pro came away almost unscathed, the M2 iPad Pro had a definitive curl in the corner near the cameras. JerryRigEverything praised the device for its “black magic levels of structural integrity”, at least when bent horizontally.

Good to know that they really are bend-resistant. But I can’t help but see some incongruity between the performative outrage over Apple’s “Crush” ad last week and the fact that the top-trending tech videos on YouTube today are of people destroying the very same iPads the “Crush” ad was promoting.

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

Instagram Cofounder Mike Krieger Joins Anthropic as Chief Product Officer ★

Mike Krieger:

Anthropic’s research continues to be at the forefront of AI. When paired with thoughtful product development, I [see] tons of potential to positively impact how people and companies get their work done. And as a two time entrepreneur, I’m particularly excited by how Claude, along with the right scaffolding and product features, can empower more people to innovate at a faster pace and at a lower cost.

Tangentially related: Anthropic shipped a native iOS Claude app two weeks ago.

Save the Date: The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2024 ★

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 11 June 2024, 7:00 pm PT
Tickets: On sale soon
Special Guest(s): Working on it...
Previous Shows: On YouTube

Apple Stiffs Researcher on Bounty for iOS Kernel Vulnerability [Update: Resolved] ★

“Meysam”, on Twitter/X:

I reported CVE-2024-27804, an iOS/macOS kernel vulnerability that leads to the execution of arbitrary code with kernel privileges.

Will publish the POC soon.

Maybe there’s more to this story, but it sure is a bad look for a $3 trillion company to have a reputation for finding technicalities to avoid paying bug bounties.

I would think Apple would want to err on the side of being liberal with bug bounty payouts, to encourage researchers to report as many as they can find.

Update: Meysam:

seem Apple have concluded that the reported CVE is not exploitable and they are planning to update the description to accurately describe the issue as an unexpected system termination rather than arbitrary code execution, but for good faith they will reward me $1000.

And to be clear, Meysam seems genuinely happy with this resolution.

StopTheMadness Pro ★

The previous item was a good reminder that I haven’t linked to StopTheMadness in a while. I first recommended it back in 2018, and mentioned it again in 2022 after developer Jeff Johnson added a font substitution feature at my request. As I wrote then:

It’s such a little thing, and I know most people can’t detect the differences between Helvetica and Arial and don’t care, but it makes me so happy every day never to see the cursed fonts Arial and Courier New.

StopTheMadness Pro does so much more than that. I’ve been using it for so long now that I’m taken aback when I use a factory-fresh no-extension installation of Safari. StopTheMadness Pro is a canonical example of a great power user utility, and Johnson updates it with new features (and new workarounds for web development dark patterns) regularly.

$15 one-time purchase, with support for iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS — and (optional) iCloud sync for shared settings across all your devices. Highly recommended.

Jeff Johnson: ‘Apple Started Cheating Me Out of App Store Bundle Purchases’ [Update: Resolved] ★

Jeff Johnson:

I’ve discovered that starting in February, Apple mistakenly subtracts the price of the previously purchased app twice from the proceeds of a “Complete My Bundle” purchase, thereby causing me to take a loss on each such bundle purchase. This accounting change has cost me thousands of dollars over the past few months.

Long story short, Johnson has a years-old Safari extension power user tool called StopTheMadness, which typically cost $10. Last year he released StopTheMadness Pro, which costs $15. Because the App Store doesn’t support upgrade pricing, Johnson created a bundle that includes both versions. Because StopTheMadness Pro is a superset of the non-pro version, the only reason the bundle exists is to allow people who previously purchased the regular version to upgrade to StopTheMadness Pro for the difference between $15 and the price they paid for the regular version.

The way it should work — and for the first few months of the bundle, did work — is that Apple should subtract the price the user originally paid from the $15 price of the bundle. Starting in February, Apple effectively began subtracting the price the user originally paid twice.

Surely this is a bug, not an attempt by Apple to swindle developers. But, how surprised are you that this bug, left unfixed, works in Apple’s favor, not the other way around? If Apple were erroneously paying developers too much, rather than too little, I’m guessing it would be fixed already.

Update: Jeff Johnson, a few hours after I posted:

Good news, everyone!

I just received a phone call from an Apple representative. They confirmed that there was indeed a software bug in the bundle pricing calculation, which was fixed yesterday. They also said that affected developers, such as myself, would be compensated for our lost revenue.

That’s all I know for now. I was told that I would also be receiving a follow-up email later.

The conversation was pleasant, and the Apple representative was very nice about it.

Casey Newton: ‘Google’s Broken Link to the Web’ ★

Casey Newton, with a sharp take on Google’s sprawling announcements at I/O yesterday:

This new approach is captured elegantly in a slogan that appeared several times during Tuesday’s keynote: let Google do the Googling for you. It’s a phrase that identifies browsing the web — a task once considered entertaining enough that it was given the nickname “surfing” — as a chore, something better left to a bot. [...]

This is such a keen observation. Part of what makes the web the web is that it’s very fun. Or at least was, and is supposed to be. The idea that people find it a chore now isn’t a condemnation of Google but the state of the web itself.

Still, as the first day of I/O wound down, it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.

Oof. What a depressing vision.

Apple Announces New Accessibility Features for 2024 ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced new accessibility features coming later this year, including Eye Tracking, a way for users with physical disabilities to control iPad or iPhone with their eyes. Additionally, Music Haptics will offer a new way for users who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience music using the Taptic Engine in iPhone; Vocal Shortcuts will allow users to perform tasks by making a custom sound; Vehicle Motion Cues can help reduce motion sickness when using iPhone or iPad in a moving vehicle; and more accessibility features will come to visionOS. These features combine the power of Apple hardware and software, harnessing Apple silicon, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to further Apple’s decades-long commitment to designing products for everyone.

The timing of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (tomorrow) has turned this into a nice little tradition: each May, Apple gets to sort of unofficially kick off “WWDC season” with these announcements of upcoming accessibility features.

Monday, 13 May 2024

OpenAI Debuts GPT-4o ‘Omni’ Model ★

Kyle Wiggers, reporting for TechCrunch:

OpenAI announced a new flagship generative AI model on Monday that they call GPT-4o — the “o” stands for “omni,” referring to the model’s ability to handle text, speech, and video. GPT-4o is set to roll out “iteratively” across the company’s developer and consumer-facing products over the next few weeks.

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said that GPT-4o provides “GPT-4-level” intelligence but improves on GPT-4’s capabilities across multiple modalities and media.

You should watch at least some of the 25-minute live-streamed announcement today, to see — and especially hear — some of the demos. GPT-4o is extraordinarily conversational, and the female voice they used is remarkably emotive. Response times seem very impressive, and in conversation GPT-4o allows you to interrupt it when it’s going in the wrong direction or just blathering.

But my first impression is that it’s too emotive — too cloying, too saccharine. It comes across as condescending, like the voice of a kind kindergarten teacher addressing her students. I suspect, though, that they turned that dial up for the demo, and that it could easily be dialed back. And it really is impressive that I can complain that it might be too emotive. Also impressive: GPT-4o will be made available to all users, including those on the free tier.

OpenAI also announced a ChatGPT Mac app, a sort of Spotlight / LaunchBar / Alfred / Raycast type thing that they’re even calling a “launcher”. It’s supposedly available now to a limited number of users, and rolling out to everyone in the coming months.

Nylas – Email and Calendar APIs ★

My thanks to Nylas for sponsoring last week at DF. Nylas recently launched v3 of their API. They rebuilt an already-great API platform with the developer experience and productivity in mind — redefining what a modern API should look like. Nylas offers a single great set of APIs for email, calendaring, and contacts.

Start building with Nylas today to discover why Nylas is trusted by 250,000+ developers at companies like Upwork, Wix, Salesloft, and Remax.

Friday, 10 May 2024

David Letterman in 2024: John Mulaney on ‘My Next Guest Needs No Introduction’ ★

Whole episode was great, but the intimate dinner with Letterman, Mulaney, and Mulaney’s dad was just amazing TV.

Mulaney’s own live talk show, Everybody’s in L.A., finishes its 6-episode limited run tonight, also on Netflix. We’ve been loving it.

David Letterman in 1985: Crushing Things With an 80-Ton Hydraulic Press ★

“If you want to have a good time, you can of course spend a lot of money going out to fancy restaurants with big floor shows, but I believe there’s more than enough good wholesome fun to be had with just a few close friends and an 80-ton hydraulic press.”

Wes Anderson Made a Commercial – and Designed a New Pen – for Montblanc ★

In case you’re in need of a video-ad palate cleanser, you won’t find a commercial more delightful than this one.

Cinematography by Linus Sandgren, of No Time To Die and Saltburn fame. More details at Vogue Business, including the fact that Montblanc found out only on set that Anderson had designed his own pen, the Schreiberling (“Scribbler” in German).

Sam Altman Puts the Kibosh on Reuters Story Claiming OpenAI Is Launching a Search Engine Next Week ★

Sam Altman, on Twitter/X:

not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love! feels like magic to me.

monday 10am PT.

Perhaps they’ve invented a way to type uppercase letters?

The Sound of Software ★

Andy Allen and Thomas Williams, from Not Boring:

Sound is an outcast in Software Design. We may embrace the aesthetics of animation and visuals, but sound is different. It’s intrusive. Unlike visuals on a screen, you can’t look away or ignore it. It’s enough to make you rip the batteries out of a toy or frisbee an iPad across the room (speaking from experience).

And yet, play a video game without sound and its powerful punch lands with no force. Without music, once moving moments in a film become dull, even comical (Jurassic Park, Rocky). Sound holds an immense power to elevate any experience — including the most boring of software.

Sound in software isn’t inherently bad. It’s just been really badly designed.

We use sound in every !Boring app, and many have called it out as one of their favorite aspects of our apps. We’ve learned a few things about when to use sound, how to design it, and how to implement it. When done right, sound unlocks a path to much richer software experiences.

Previously: “The World’s Most Satisfying Checkbox”.

Classic Marathon Is Now on Steam ★

Even the user manual brings back memories. (“This manual contains sarcastic language that some readers might find condescending.”) From the “Performance Notes” section:

For Power Mac Users
If you need more speed, you better call the Apple Dealer where you bought your computer, ’cuz he probably sold you a Centris in a Power Mac case. Keep in mind however, that as of System 7.5 the sound drivers in the Power Mac are still running under emulation. You will, therefore, see speed gains by decreasing the number of sound channels Marathon uses. [...]

For 68020 Mac Users (Mac II, LC, LCII)
Unfortunately you are at the bottom of the food chain here. You will probably want to run in low res at 50% screen size with no floor or ceiling textures, no music, one channel sound, and with the every other scan line option selected. In all honesty though, you’ll probably want to run on a Power Mac. Look on the bright side, Apple just lowered their prices again...

I owned an LC at the time, but played all my Marathon at the Drexel student newspaper on Power Macs. They really shouldn’t have even claimed it ran at all on 68020 Macs.

Pointless NYT Report Says Apple Plans to Improve Siri ★

The Times sent me a news alert for this story — under the three-way byline of Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen, and Cade Metz — but I don’t think there’s a single sentence of news in the entire thing. The gist of it is that Apple recognizes that ChatGPT makes Siri look even dumber than it did before and that they plan to use LLM technology to improve it. That’s it.

Determined to catch up in the tech industry’s A.I. race, Apple has made generative A.I. a tent pole project — the company’s special, internal label that it uses to organize employees around once-in-a-decade initiatives.

This is niggling, I know, but if “tent pole projects” only come once per decade at Apple, that means, by the Times’s count, there have only been 4 or 5 since the Macintosh debuted 40 years ago.

The truth is that in Apple lingo, tentpole is used to describe features, not projects, and they aim to ship around three or four tentpole features in every major release. The tentpole features are the ones that get the most time in keynotes. It’d be flabbergasting, given the current state of the tech world and Apple’s teasers, if a much-improved LLM-based Siri were not one of the tentpole features announced at WWDC next month.

(Bonus usage note: New Oxford American — the dictionary Apple licenses to include with MacOS and iOS — has the term as two words, “tent pole”, and thus hyphenated when used as a modifier. But Merriam-Webster closes it up, both as a noun and adjective. The Times isn’t nearly the bastion of consistency and quality that it once was, and, having dismantled its once-legendary copy desk 7 years ago, you’ll be unsurprised to know that in other recent articles tentpole has appeared in closed-up form.)

Reuters: OpenAI to Announce Google Search Competitor on Monday ★

Anna Tong, reporting for Reuters:

OpenAI plans to announce its artificial intelligence-powered search product on Monday, according to two sources familiar with the matter, raising the stakes in its competition with search king Google. […]

The announcement could be timed a day before the Tuesday start of Google’s annual I/O conference, where the tech giant is expected to unveil a slew of AI-related products.

Remember the thing about Netflix being in a race to become HBO before HBO could become Netflix? My money here is that Google can become OpenAI (with generative AI) before OpenAI can become Google (with search), because I just don’t think OpenAI has any sort of moat around ChatGPT. They’re ahead but everyone else is nipping at their heels.

But: Google has left itself vulnerable by allowing the quality of Google Search results to degrade so much in recent years. Google remains dominant in search, but their share has started dropping.

Update: Sam Altman says nope, not a search engine, but they are launching something new Monday.

Thursday, 9 May 2024

Logitech Announces Keyboard Cases for New iPad Air and iPad Pro Models ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

The Combo Touch for the 11-inch iPad Air is $200, while the Combo Touch for the 13-inch model is $230. The iPad Pro versions are priced at $230 and $260, respectively, for the 11-inch and 13-inch models. The keyboards can be purchased from the Logitech website.

Apple itself charges more for everything with the iPad Pro models — e.g. it costs $200 to add cellular to an iPad Pro, but only $150 to add cellular to other iPads — but I don’t think there’s any difference between Logitech’s Air and Pro models other than the depth of the case.

Update: The Combo Touch cases for the new iPad Pro models are not yet available to order.

The New iPads No Longer Include Stickers ★

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

In a memo distributed to Apple Store teams on Tuesday and viewed by 9to5Mac, Apple explained that Apple stickers will not be included in the box for the new iPad Pro and iPad Air. The company says that this is part of its environmental goals, as it strives to ensure its packaging is completely plastic-free.

Apple Stores, however, are receiving shipments with a limited quantity of Apple logo stickers that can be distributed to customers who buy a new iPad Pro or iPad Air, but only upon request. So, if you buy an iPad Pro or iPad Air from an Apple Store, you can request an Apple sticker at the time of purchase.

When Apple Stores run out of their supply of stickers, they can order more from Apple.

Boo hiss. The fun of those stickers outweighs their environmental impact. Seriously, who thinks including a couple of stickers in the box is hurting the environment?

Apple’s ‘Let Loose’ iPad Event Was Shot on iPhone — With Panavision Lenses ★

Stu Maschwitz, writing at Prolost:

After Apple released a behind-the-scenes video about the production of “Scary Fast,” the Internet did its internet thing and questioned the “Shot on iPhone” claim, as if “Shot on iPhone” inherently means “shot with zero other gear besides an iPhone.” These takes were dumb and bad and some even included assertions that Apple added additional lensing to the phones, which they did not.

But for “Let Loose,” they did.

“Let Loose” was shot on iPhone 15 Pro Max, and Apple informed me on background that for several shots where a shallow depth-of-field was desired, Panavision lenses were attached to the iPhones using a Panavision-developed mount called the “Lens Relay System.” This rig is publicly available for rent from Panavision today, although not currently listed on their website.

Nice scoop. Also:

In fact, “Let Loose” is the first Apple Event finished and streamed in HDR, pushing the iPhone’s capture abilities even further than “Scary Fast.”

‘Goodbye to Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio’ ★

Chris Welch, The Verge:

Then there was the fact that the folio keyboard was so damn light. It kept the iPad Pro feeling like an iPad in my bag. That has never, ever been the case with a Magic Keyboard attached. When it goes on, you’ve entered MacBook weight territory. I’m not saying there’s any problem with that, but with the Smart Keyboard Folio, there was something special about toting around such a powerful combo that always stayed so airy on my back.

At best, Apple is being somewhat stubborn in assuming that every iPad Pro buyer wants the tablet to feel like a laptop (and be a similar weight to one) whenever a keyboard is attached, which is what the Magic Keyboard gets you. If you want to view it with more pessimism, the company is intentionally doing away with what was a compelling, more affordable accessory — one that was easy to take anywhere — in hopes that more people will cave and fork over $300 for the only first-party keyboard that’s available for the new Pro.

I suspect if it had been more popular, Apple would have made new ones for the new iPads. But I know Welch is not alone in his affinity for it. The textile-covered keyboard was far from ideal for typing feel, but the whole point of the Smart Keyboard Folio was to be a “good enough” keyboard when you need it — and the nature of that sort of keyboard made it perfect for use in a kitchen, with wet or dirty fingers. It was a keyboard cover you could just leave on your iPad all the time — and the Magic Keyboard isn’t that.

Is the ‘Crush’ Backlash a Dead Canary in the Apple Brand Coal Mine? ★

David Heinemeier Hansson:

This should all be eerily familiar to anyone who saw Microsoft fall from grace in the 90s. From being America’s favorite software company to being the bully pursued by the DOJ for illegalities. Just like Apple now, Microsoft’s reputation and good standing suddenly evaporated seemingly overnight once enough critical stories had accumulated about its behavior.

It’s not easy to predict these tipping points. Tim Cook enthusiastically introduced this awful ad with a big smile, and I’m sure he’s sitting with at least some sense of “wtf just happened?” and “why don’t they love us any more?”. Because companies like Apple almost have to ignore the haters as the cost of doing business, but then they also can’t easily tell when the sentiment has changed from “the usual number” to “one too many”. And then, boom, the game is forever changed.

Ever since this controversy regarding the “Crush” ad erupted yesterday, I’ve been wondering the same thing. As I wrote yesterday, when I first saw the ad during the keynote, I didn’t think twice about it. It didn’t strike me as particularly clever, but I didn’t suspect for even a second that it might prove even slighty controversial. It just didn’t strike a nerve for me. But clearly it struck a nerve for many, evoking negative emotional responses — which for a brand like Apple’s, makes it ipso facto a failed ad.

But Apple could have used this exact same concept for any previous “thinnest ever” iPad. They could have used this exact same commercial for the original iPad in 2010 — a device that doesn’t seem thin or light by today’s standards but was rightly considered remarkably thin and light at the time it launched. You can paint, you can draw, you can edit photos and video, you can make music, you can play games — all in this single incredibly thin device. That’s not a new message for iPads.

Would this exact same commercial have evoked the same collective response in 2010? I’m going to say no, it would not have. What about in 2018? I’m going to say ... probably not? Something has changed. Part of it is that our culture has changed. I don’t think many people 10 or 15 years ago would have seen dissonance between Apple’s oft-professed sustainability ideals and a commercial celebrating the destruction of artistic tools and objects. And the bigger change is the recognition that computers are eating the world. In 2010 it was seen only as cool that computers were doing more and more stuff. Today there’s widespread uncomfortableness, perhaps outright concern, that the digital world is consuming the analog one. It plays differently today than a decade ago to emphasize that an iPad can replace a veritable truck-full of artistic tools and toys.

But part too is that Apple’s position in our culture has changed. They’re no longer, and never again will be, the upstart. They’re The Man now. They’re part of the firmament of our entire society, not just the tech world. When you’re on top, everyone guns for you.

Apple Apologizes for ‘Crush’ Ad: ‘We Missed the Mark With This Video, and We’re Sorry’ ★

Tor Myhren, Apple’s VP of marketing communications, in a statement to Ad Age:

Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world. Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.

Not just an apology, but an apology attributed to a person. That’s how you do it.

The standard shouldn’t be never to make a mistake. It’s to make as few mistakes as possible, but quickly recognize, acknowledge, and address the ones you do make.

(Via 9to5Mac, which helpfully quotes Myhren’s entire statement. Ad Age’s paywall offers zero free page views.)

Crushed-Into-a-Handheld-Gadget Commercials ★

Andy Allen found a 2008 LG phone commercial that’s pretty much the same concept as Apple’s new “Crush” ad. And here’s a 1998 Nintendo commercial in which a bus full of Pokemon get smushed into a Game Boy.

Quinn Nelson on the New iPads and iPad Peripherals ★

Lots of nerdy details on both the tandem OLED “Pro XDR Ultra Max Plus Extreme” display technology (I think that’s the marketing name?) and TSMC’s next-gen 3nm process used to fabricate the M4 chips.

Wednesday, 8 May 2024

John Ternus as Apple CEO? ★

Mark Gurman, writing at Bloomberg, posits that John Ternus might be the leading candidate to succeed Tim Cook as CEO:

“Tim likes him a lot, because he can give a good presentation, he’s very mild-mannered, never puts anything into an email that is controversial and is a very reticent decision-maker,” says one person close to Apple’s executive team. “He has a lot of managerial characteristics like Tim.” Christopher Stringer, a former top Apple hardware designer, called Ternus a “trustworthy hand” who’s “never failed with any role he’s been elevated to.” Eddy Cue, the Apple executive known as Cook’s closest confidant, has privately told colleagues that Ternus should be the next CEO, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

I wouldn’t have linked to this if not for the above line about Eddy Cue. If Cue is telling people that, that means a lot. No executive at Apple is more juiced-in company-wide than Cue. Cook’s first action as CEO was to promote Cue, and Cue was arguably just as tight with and trusted by Steve Jobs.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ Ad for the New iPad Pros Is, Well, Getting Crushed ★

Todd Spangler, writing for Variety:

An Apple commercial for the new iPad Pro tablet showing an industrial press literally crushing a TV, musical instruments, books and more ignited an angry backlash among many in Hollywood and other creative industries.

The ad, titled “Crush!”, shows an array of various objects — including a record player, a piano, a guitar, an old TV set, cameras, a typewriter, books, paint cans and a classic arcade game machine — getting compressed into (voila!) the new iPad Pro. The spot is soundtracked to Sonny and Cher’s “All I Ever Need Is You.”

But the ad has been interpreted more as a visual depiction of the tech industry’s devastation of cultural industries. “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley,” actor Hugh Grant commented on X.

Personally, I didn’t think twice about this spot when it ran during the keynote yesterday. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either. I sort of like seeing things get smashed, run over, or, best of all, dropped from rooftops, and that’s really all I took from it at the moment. But a lot of people find the spot unpleasant, if not downright disturbing, not because they’re bothered by seeing stuff get smushed but because of the implied message. To wit, as Grant quipped, that technology not only replaces analog instruments and objects of artistic expression, but destroys them.

Thought about that way, it’s clearly a mistake — the vivisection of technology and liberal arts.

The best response is this “fixed it for you” version from filmmaker Reza Sixo Safai, simply running the commercial backwards (and choosing a better Sonny and Cher song). Same message, but emphasizing creation rather than destruction.

‘Slop’ as a Neologism for Mindlessly Spewed AI-Generated Content ★

Simon Willison:

I’m a big proponent of LLMs as tools for personal productivity, and as software platforms for building interesting applications that can interact with human language.

But I’m increasingly of the opinion that sharing unreviewed content that has been artificially generated with other people is rude.

Slop is the ideal name for this anti-pattern.

Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term for it.

Endorsed.

Marvel Studios Announces ‘What If…? — An Immersive Story’, Exclusively for Vision Pro ★

Marvel:

Marvel Studios and ILM Immersive announce What If…? — An Immersive Story, the first-ever interactive Disney+ Original story coming exclusively to Apple Vision Pro. Fans will be invited to step inside the Multiverse like never before and have the chance to dive into an immersive, narrative-driven and innovative story in mixed reality. Connected to the critically acclaimed Disney+ Original animated series What If…?, Marvel.com was given a first look at the hour-long experience, diving into what fans can expect when it is released soon as a new app for Apple Vision Pro.

WSJ: Apple Is Developing AI Chips for Data Centers ★

Aaron Tilley and Yang Jie, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

Apple has been working on its own chip designed to run artificial-intelligence software in data-center servers, a move that has the potential to give the company an advantage in the AI arms race.

Over the past decade, Apple has emerged as a leading player designing chips for iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch and Mac computers. The server project, which is internally code-named Project ACDC — for Apple Chips in Data Center — will bring this talent to bear for the company’s servers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Project ACDC has been in the works for several years and it is uncertain when the new chip will be unveiled, if ever.

Another rebuttal to the whole “Apple is behind on AI” discourse. Apple is just doing things their own way, at their own pace, and they’re not going to talk about any of it in advance. Custom chip development is slow, expensive, and indicates an extreme commitment.

As for the “ACDC” codename, if I didn’t know any better, I’d half wonder if Jim Dalrymple took a job on Apple’s silicon team.

Tuesday, 7 May 2024

TikTok Sues US Government Over Forced Divestiture and Potential Ban ★

Sapna Maheshwari and David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times:

TikTok sued the federal government on Tuesday over a new law that would force its Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the popular social media app or face a ban in the United States, stoking a battle over national security and free speech that is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

TikTok said the law violated the First Amendment by effectively removing an app that millions of Americans use to share their views and communicate freely. It also argued that a divestiture was “simply not possible,” especially within the law’s 270-day timeline, pointing to difficulties such as Beijing’s refusal to sell a key feature that powers TikTok in the United States.

Must be nice for a Chinese company to be able to sue the government and make arguments on freedom of speech grounds.

Nintendo Pre-Announces Switch Successor’s Announcement ★

Nintendo, on Twitter/X:

This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.

Must be Big News for Beloved Tablets Day.

Techmeme’s Roundup of Commentary on Apple’s ‘Let Loose’ iPad Event ★

Gurman’s last-minute “Maybe they’ll have the M4” might be the greatest rumor scoop in recent memory. A fella could lose his shirt betting against him lately.

Monday, 6 May 2024

Erasable Logo on Apple’s Homepage ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Hovering over the Apple logo and moving the mouse allows the current artwork to be erased and replaced with a new logo design. Apple created a total of six logos for the May 7 “Let Loose” event, and the interactive eraser cycles through those options.

Would be cool if Apple’s managed to pull off being able to use the end of the new Pencil as an eraser, just like a real pencil.

Fitting Facts to the Narrative at The Washington Post ★

From a Washington Post story headlined “Apple Is Behind in AI and Killed Its Self-Driving Car Project. What’s Next?”:

The company’s Greater China region, which encompasses mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, has long been one of Apple’s most crucial growth zones. But growing pressure from a handful local rivals — including Shenzhen-based Huawei, which surmounted U.S. sanctions aimed at slowing its advance in late 2023 by producing a smartphone with a domestically made processor — cut sharply into Apple’s market share in the region earlier this year.

Data from market research firm Counterpoint Research indicated that Apple’s sales in China dipped by nearly 20 percent in the first quarter of 2024, a shift that senior research analyst Ivan Lam attributed partially to “Huawei’s comeback.”

The full scope of the company’s decline in China became clear Thursday, when Apple reported an 8 percent revenue dip compared to a year earlier.

It’s inexplicable that the Post included a paragraph with projections from Counterpoint claiming iPhone sales in China were down 20 percent even after Apple reported its actual results for the quarter. Jason Snell, over at Six Colors:

Finally, I particularly enjoyed the exchange between Wells Fargo’s Aaron Rakers and Cook in which Rakers asked Cook to explain Apple’s results compared to the data reported by independent research groups that suggested iPhone sales were falling apart in China. Apple’s actual numbers weren’t that bad, and in fact, Apple trumpeted how well the iPhone was going in urban China.

“I can’t address the data points,” Cook said. “I can only address what our results are, and you know, we did accelerate last quarter. And iPhone grew in mainland China, so that’s what the results were. I can’t bridge to numbers we didn’t come up with.”

That’s about as savage a shade-throwing as you’ll get on an Apple analyst call.

iPhone grew in mainland China last quarter but even after Apple announced that — in a legally-binding context — they went with made-up projections from Counterpoint to fit their narrative that Apple is in trouble.

While I’m being grumpy, I’ll even take issue with the notion — which the Post leads with in its headline — that Apple is “behind in AI”? It is true that Apple doesn’t offer an AI chat product like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, or Google’s Gemini. But do we expect Apple ever to offer such a project? Apple doesn’t have a web search engine but no one is arguing that Apple is “behind” on search. (App Store search results quality is another issue.) Apple doesn’t offer turnkey cloud computing services like AWS or Google Cloud either. Are they “behind” on that? When it comes to the products Apple already sells, how are they “behind on AI”? Are iPhone users missing out on AI features available only to Android users? No. Are MacBook users missing out because Apple hasn’t added a dedicated AI key to their keyboards?

I get that people see AI as a frontier that is transforming the industry, and Apple hasn’t revealed any new plans or features yet. But I’d say Apple is silent on AI, not behind. When iOS and Mac users are missing out on features that are only available on other platforms, that’s when I’d say Apple is behind.

Logitech’s Mouse Software Now Includes ChatGPT Support, Adds Janky ‘ai_overlay_tmp’ Directory to Users’ Home Folders ★

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

I know AI is all the rage right now and having a deal to bring ChatGPT into your software is trendy, but including a tool like this in what is basically a mouse driver is ridiculous. I’m not opposed to using AI in software. I’m just opposed to when it shows up as an unexpected, poorly-implemented feature in software that doesn’t need it.

At least Logitech’s Mac developers did such a bad job with it, that it was easy to spot.

Logitech committed a bunch of sins with this mouse driver. First, it just seems ridiculous to add an AI prompt feature to a mouse driver. Second, no matter what the feature, it’s wrong to add a top-level folder to a user’s home directory — and it’s especially wrong to give such a folder a dumb name like “ai_overlay_tmp”.

It’s more common for poorly-programmed Mac software to create such folders with a leading dot in their names, an age-old Unix convention that tells the Finder to treat them as “invisible”. But that’s poor form on MacOS too. Support folders should be organized in standard sub-folders inside the user’s Library folder. Open Terminal and type ls -a at the root of your home folder and you’ll probably see a lot of detritus that ought to be inside your Library folder.

Hackett has switched from Logitech’s mouse software to the excellent SteerMouse, an excellent $20 mouse driver that supports just about every mouse in the world. I’ve been using and wholeheartedly recommending SteerMouse for nearly 20 years.

It’s also the case that even with a third-party mouse, you might not want any third-party driver software at all. MacOS’s built-in mouse software recognizes most mice. I rely on SteerMouse not because my mouse has lots of buttons (it doesn’t), but to get fine-grained control over the speed and acceleration of the pointer. SteerMouse lets me set my mouse to go way, way faster than the built-in Mouse panel in Settings does — something I’ve done for decades to reduce wrist fatigue and pain. I can move my pointer from corner to corner across my Studio Display by moving my mouse just a few centimeters.

The problem is, many people — perhaps especially people whose computing experience was forged on Windows — wrongly assume that if you buy a Brand X mouse, you need to install Brand X’s software to use it. For Logitech mouse users, that means AI software they neither want nor need running in the background, and an ugly cryptically-named temp folder stinking up their home directory like a squatter.

Yours Truly on ‘First Ones’ ★

Brian McCullough at the Techmeme Ride Home podcast has a new YouTube series, “First Ones”, where he asks his guests for their firsts — first computer, first movie in a theater, etc. Guests so far, in addition to me, include Guy Kawasaki, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, Ed Zitron, and more. Very fun.

Apple Watch Ultra’s Best Feature: Battery Life ★

Jason Aten, writing for Inc.:

I don’t run marathons or climb mountains or dive. I don’t often find myself in remote locations in precarious situations. I joked that, for me, the Apple Watch Ultra will be the perfect thing to wear while other people are working out. Like, for example, when I’m keeping track of my daughter’s cross-country race splits.

When I first started wearing the Ultra, I was sure the most useful feature was what Apple calls the Action Button. I still think the ability to assign a dedicated button to things like starting a workout or a stopwatch is great, but there’s a far better feature, and the most surprising thing is that Apple isn’t making a big deal of it at all.

That’s the fact that the Apple Watch Ultra has ridiculous battery life, at least by Apple Watch standards. Yes, Apple has said that the Ultra has the best battery life of any Apple Watch. But Apple is dramatically underselling the battery life on its new flagship wearable, claiming it gets 36 hours. In my experience, it got more than 60 hours.

Two thoughts about this:

Perhaps Apple underplays the Ultra’s battery life so as not to make the battery life on the regular Series 9 models look bad? From my experience while reviewing the original Ultra, I could get two days of battery life on a single charge even while wearing it to sleep.
The battery life on all Apple Watch models from the last few years offers a stark contrast to the dedicated AI gadgets we’re starting to see, like Humane’s AI Pin and Rabbit’s R1 handheld dingus. It goes under-remarked-upon that Apple is really really good at making computer hardware, and particularly at making small computer hardware.

Boring News: Vision Pro Sales Are Going Just About as Expected ★

Ming-Chi Kuo, two weeks ago:

Apple has cut its 2024 Vision Pro shipments to 400–450k units (vs. market consensus of 700–800k units or more). Apple cut orders before launching Vision Pro in non-US markets, which means that demand in the US market has fallen sharply beyond expectations, making Apple take a conservative view of demand in non-US markets.

Neil Cybart, on Twitter/X:

Ming-Chi Kuo’s numbers and statements regarding Apple Vision Pro sales don’t make sense. [...]

Interestingly, when framing a 400K to 450K unit sales figure for Vision Pro in 2024 (which would actually be a good result), Kuo compares the range to a made up consensus figure of 700K to 800K unit sales. I don’t recall anyone running with such a high sales range for Vision Pro in 2024. Instead, Kuo himself actually claimed back on Feb 28th that a few suppliers were planning for 700K to 800K production. That’s not the same as a sales forecast. Far from it. Kuo would know that too, so one is left to assume he’s purposely being misleading.

Ming-Chi Kuo occasionally uncovers legitimate scoops from Apple’s Asian supply chain. Ming-Chi Kuo also regularly inserts his own name into the news when he has no legitimate scoops. This is one of the latter. There was no “market consensus” that Apple would sell 700–800K Vision Pro units in 2024. In fact, the reporting has been around the 400–450K range since last summer.

The Financial Times, back on 3 July 2023:

Two people close to Apple and Luxshare, the Chinese contract manufacturer that will initially assemble the device, said it was preparing to make fewer than 400,000 units in 2024. Multiple industry sources said Luxshare was currently Apple’s only assembler of the device. Separately, two China-based sole suppliers of certain components for the Vision Pro said Apple was only asking them for enough for 130,000 to 150,000 units in the first year.

TheElec reported last June that Sony only had the capacity to manufacture 900,000 OLED panels per year for Vision Pro, which, if true, would cap Vision Pro headset production at 450,000 units. The Information reported in August that this display bottleneck “is one reason why Apple plans to make fewer than half a million Vision Pros in the first year of production”.

Meta Threatens to Pull WhatsApp From India Over Encryption Battle ★

Russell Brandom, reporting for Rest of World:

IT rules passed by India in 2021 require services like WhatsApp to maintain “traceability” for all messages, allowing authorities to follow forwarded messages to the “first originator” of the text.

In a Delhi High Court proceeding last Thursday, WhatsApp said it would be forced to leave the country if the court required traceability, as doing so would mean breaking end-to-end encryption. It’s a common stance for encrypted chat services generally, and WhatsApp has made this threat before — most notably in a protracted legal fight in Brazil that resulted in intermittent bans. But as the Indian government expands its powers over online speech, the threat of a full-scale ban is closer than it’s been in years. [...]

It’s not clear how the courts will respond to WhatsApp’s ultimatum, but they’ll have to take it seriously. WhatsApp is used by more than half a billion people in India — not just as a chat app, but as a doctor’s office, a campaigning tool, and the backbone of countless small businesses and service jobs. There’s no clear competitor to fill its shoes, so if the app is shut down in India, much of the digital infrastructure of the nation would simply disappear. Being forced out of the country would be bad for WhatsApp, but it would be disastrous for everyday Indians.

One thing to remember is that this isn’t so much a conflict between what the law demands and what Meta chooses to do, but rather a conflict between what the law demands and the secure-by-design nature of WhatsApp. There is no “traceability” switch that Meta could flip but is choosing not to. They’d have to build a completely new, insecure-by-design, protocol to comply with this law.

Kolide ★

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring last week at DF. Deepfakes are good and only getting better. In real life, people only detect voice clones about 50% of the time. You might as well flip a coin. And that makes businesses extremely vulnerable to attacks.

In the “classic” voice clone scam, the caller is after an immediate payout (“Hi, it’s me, your boss. Wire a bunch of company money to this account ASAP”). Then there are the more complex social engineering attacks, where a phone call is just the entryway to break into a company’s systems and steal data or plant malware (that’s what happened in the MGM attack, albeit without the use of AI).

But the good news is that we can be trained to learn how to identify suspicious phone calls — even when the voice sounds just like someone we trust. If you want to learn more about Kolide’s findings, read their report exploring the details of audio deepfakes.

Sunday, 5 May 2024

‘Boba Fett? Boba Fett? Where?!’ ★: I think this “May the Fourth” nonsense has gotten out of hand but this commercial from Apple is chef’s kiss. So fun. (Via Dan Moren, who points out a bunch of Easter eggs.)

Friday, 3 May 2024

Three-Year Gap Between Vision Pro 1 and 2? ★

Mark Gurman:

The good news for Meta is it could have plenty of time to pursue that goal. Apple’s latest Vision Pro road map doesn’t currently call for a second-generation model until the end of 2026, though the company is trying to figure out a way to bring a cheaper version to market before then. Apple is still flummoxed by how exactly to bring down the cost, I’m told.

If true this seems utterly bizarre. That would be close to a three-year gap between today’s first-generation Vision Pro and a second-gen model. Think about the iPad Pro. The ones on sale today, which we all presume will be replaced four days from now, were released in October 2022. That’s 18 months. And the general consensus is that the iPad Pro has gone a long time between updates.

“Late 2026” would presumably mean October or November 2026. That’d be 33 or 34 months after the release of the first-gen Vision Pro. So imagine the Vision Pro being as long-in-the-tooth as the iPad Pros are today and still being almost a year away from an update. That makes no sense. To everyone outside Apple it would, quite reasonably, look like an abandoned platform. They kind of did exactly that with the HomePod, but Vision was introduced as a major new platform, not a peripheral. Why wouldn’t there be at least a speed bump from the M2 to M3 or something between now and late 2026? Waiting until the end of 2025 would be a long (nearly two-year) gap; the end of 2026 might as well be forever from now.

A yearslong gap until the next Vision Pro might make sense if there were a, say, Vision Air on the roadmap for 2025, but Gurman says Apple doesn’t know how to make such a thing yet.

Thursday, 2 May 2024

Annotating Tim Cook’s Remarks on the Q2 Analyst Call ★

From Six Colors’s transcript of Apple’s financial results conference call:

Keep in mind, as we described on the last call, in the March quarter a year ago, we were able to replenish iPhone channel inventory and fulfill significant pent-up demand from the December quarter COVID-related supply disruptions on the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max. We estimate this one-time impact added close to $5 billion to the March quarter revenue last year. If we removed this from last year’s results, our March quarter total company revenue this year would have grown. Despite this impact, we were still able to deliver the records I described.

Excuses are cheap, but this really is a credible explanation.

We continue to feel very bullish about our opportunity in generative AI. We are making significant investments, and we’re looking forward to sharing some very exciting things with our customers soon. We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software, and services integration, groundbreaking Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy, which underpins everything we create. [...]

Turning to Mac, March quarter revenue was $7.5 billion, up 4% from a year ago. We had an amazing launch in early March with the new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air. The world’s most popular laptop is the best consumer laptop for AI, with breakthrough performance of the M3 chip and its even more powerful neural engine.

This doesn’t sound to me like a man about to announce iPad Pros with M4 chips. The present-tense “industry-leading neural engines” to me says Apple feels good about the AI capabilities of the devices already in our hands. What makes for a good “AI computer” are the very same things that make for a good computer, period.

However, we still saw growth on iPhone in some markets, including mainland China, and according to Kantar, during the quarter, the two best-selling smartphones in urban China were the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro Max.

It’s somewhat interesting to me that those are the two iPhone models: on the consumer side, the smaller-display iPhone 15; on the pro side, the big-display iPhone 15 Pro Max. The cheapest iPhone 15 model and the most expensive one.

Apple’s Regional Segments for Financial Reporting ★

My recent focus on the European Union’s DMA and the notion that, if the EU pushes too hard, Apple might pull back from sales in the EU, had me looking at how the company defines the “Europe” segment in its financial reporting. On the surface one might think that Apple’s “Europe” is just the EU plus the United Kingdom and Norway. But it’s actually much bigger than that: it’s all of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India. (Last I checked Africa is a pretty big continent, and India a pretty populous country.)

Today’s financial report for Q2 FY2024 got me wondering how exactly Apple defines its other regions. From their 2023 10-K (PDF):

The Company manages its business primarily on a geographic basis. The Company’s reportable segments consist of the Americas, Europe, Greater China, Japan and Rest of Asia Pacific. Americas includes both North and South America. Europe includes European countries, as well as India, the Middle East and Africa. Greater China includes China mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Rest of Asia Pacific includes Australia and those Asian countries not included in the Company’s other reportable segments. Although the reportable segments provide similar hardware and software products and similar services, each one is managed separately to better align with the location of the Company’s customers and distribution partners and the unique market dynamics of each geographic region.

“Japan and Rest of Asia Pacific” are two segments, but that clause is one of those examples that exemplifies why the Oxford Comma ought to be house style everywhere — as written, sans comma, that could easily be misread as a single segment.

Apple Q2 2024 Results ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2024 second quarter ended March 30, 2024. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $90.8 billion, down 4 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.53.

Net sales year-over-year by product (from Apple’s consolidated statement):

	Percentage	Dollars
iPhone	-10%	-$5.4B
Mac	+4%	+$0.3B
iPad	-17%	-$1.1B
Wearables, etc.	-10%	-$0.8B
Services	+14%	+3.0B

And by region:

	Percentage	Dollars
Americas	-1%	-$0.5B
Europe	+1%	+$0.2B
Greater China	-8%	-$1.4B
Japan	-13%	-$0.9B
Rest of Asia Pacific	-17%	-$1.4B

Credit where credit is due: IDC’s projection that iPhone sales were down 10 percent year-over-year was spot-on.

And Tim Cook’s decade-ago decision to focus both the company and investors’ attention on Services looks ever more prescient. As it stands, a 4 percent overall drop in revenue makes for an ever-so-slightly bad quarter. If not for Services growth, however, this would’ve been a not-so-slightly bad quarter.