Apple is officially positioning AirPods as the beginning of the end of wired headphones. I would go much further. AirPods are the latest clue that the post-iPhone era is approaching. The writing is on the wall. A pair of AirPods (or even just one AirPod in an ear) and an Apple Watch with cellular connectively will eventually be able to handle many of the most popular tasks currently given to an iPhone.
The device on which we arguably use personal assistants most often, the smartphone, is far from ideal. “We’re used to using touch screens, but when you’re in a car, that’s not what you want to do, and you certainly don’t want to be looking at a display,” Atkinson reasons.
Atkinson says that as Siri gets more intelligent, it may be able to recognize certain important sounds in the environment. For example, if a user hears a siren while driving, the AirPods might immediately mute any messages or other audio.
In the ear, Siri is more discreet and polite as a notifications device. Sensors in the device will know if you are in conversation, and will break in only with the most important verbal notifications. “John, if you don’t leave now you will miss your meeting with IBM.” That’s far more discreet than getting buzzed on one’s wrist as a cue to look down at some update.
“Your personal digital assistant needs to understand what you’re saying, and be able to piece together concepts even from your quiet mumblings,” Atkinson says. “It will understand the difference between a sequitur and a non sequitur; a simple transcribing technology wouldn’t understand that.”
The assistant needs to understand when the user is talking about taboo subjects, or saying something that’s politically incorrect,” Atkinson says. “I think we will slowly get there.”
Apple introduced the new iPhone yesterday, and the Internet is now marinating in the flow of feedback. There is a lot to like and I am tempted to replace my iPhone 6s for one reason: the improved camera. Tempted, but not convinced.
Would the camera improvements translate into better photos for me? That is the question. Here is what has improved from iPhone 6s and may interest me:
Aperture goes from f/2.2 to f/1.8, significant especially for pseudo-macro shots I love to take
Optical image stabilization, should improve low-light photos and video generally
Not sure what the six- versus five-element lens update will do for my photos, practically
New Apple-designed signal processing chip, may or may not be a big deal for me
Wide color gamut, may or may not be a big deal
Improved LED flash underwhelms me as I’m not a frequent flash user
FaceTime HD camera improved megapixel count from 5mp to 7mp, and jump from 720p to 1080p video, doesn’t fill a big need for me.
Overall, I’m sure the new camera will help me take somewhat better photos. But the current iPhone 6s camera already gives me damn nice shots. I would rate the possible improvements as incremental overall. For some types of pictures, the improvements would probably be significant, but those are likely a minority of the photos I take.
The other non-camera improvements are interesting, but I’m not sure the sum of all these changes will compel me to abandon my typical two-year ownership pattern to spring for a new phone. I’m generally very happy with my iPhone 6s.
And then there are the drawbacks of the new design, notably the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack. The loss of the headphone jack is a negative for me. I’m just not ready for this change, given the ways that I use my phone, including plugging it into my car audio system (a car without Bluetooth), and charging the phone while I’m driving and listening to podcasts. The inability to charge and listen simultaneously is an especially serious downside. Surely someone is going to come out with an adapter that melds the charging and audio features if it is possible, but I don’t know if it is. UPDATE - It is possible, and Belkin will have this.
One nit pointed out by others is the notion that because the iPhone 7 is nearly identical-looking to the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6 before it, it’s less appealing, or that this means Apple is not doing something it should be with respect to industrial design (see the New York Times). I think the current design is beautiful, and I’m happy it will stick around for another generation. The one thing I would ding Apple for, however, is that since the new design is so slightly different because of the camera, for those who use a case and are upgrading from one of the 6 versions, you’ll likely need to spring for a new case. Apple surely could have anticipated that the new camera would have a slightly larger lens diameter, and made the cases for the previous design with a slightly larger camera/flash cutout (and it is slight). Spending another $39 would piss me off since I have a perfectly good case right here that would otherwise fit a new iPhone 7 just fine.
So this appears to be another great device, but it’s just a bit better than the one I already have. I’ll probably sit this upgrade cycle out.
After sixteen months, the adhesive holding the screen to my Apple Watch Sport has failed:
I’m a bit surprised and not happy, needless to say.
My suspicion is that this is due to moisture. The watch is rated for IPX7 water resistance, which means it’s protected from, “rain, splashing and accidental submersion,” or more technically, “immersion in water with a depth of up to 1 meter (or 3.2ft) for up to 30 mins.” Maybe the immersion I’ve exposed it to, including showering with it regularly (just like Tim Cook does), and submersion in a few rivers, lakes, and oceans briefly while fishing was bad because it was intentional rather than accidental; surely the watch could tell the difference.
Or maybe it was the salt water, though it was just a few very brief dunkings (maybe a dozen, and less than five seconds each) over the past year. Who knows? Its ultimate failure was on a road trip to Nova Scotia last week. One morning, I put it on and felt a weird rattling sensation, and then the screen just popped off, retained only by an internal cable.
It still works, though. If I can find the correct adhesive, I’d like to fix the thing and keep it running for another year or so, which was always the plan. Not wearing it for the past week has been a drag. I rely on it primarily for fitness tracking and notifications, and quick glances at the weather and time. I miss it.
If I could do it all over again, here is what I would do differently. I would start the exact same way, with Dave and me designing Vesper for iPhone. But then, before Brent wrote a single line of code, we would immediately design Vesper for Mac. And that’s the product we’d have built and shipped first. There is downward pressure on pricing for Mac apps, but the market is still there for quality apps that cost $20–100 (or more). The plan would have looked like this:
Build Vesper for Mac. Sell it for around $20.
Build a sync system.
Build Vesper for iPhone.
Build Vesper for iPad.
Maybe build a web version.
This seems like good advice for developers looking to build a sustainable business. An iOS app alone is a long-shot way to attempt it, but starting with a Mac app and building a companion iOS app, if applicable, could be a better way to do this successfully. Productivity and other types of apps that are convenient to use on different devices and can share and sync data make sense for this type of business model. Games or other types of apps that only make sense on iOS would not apply.
Another good point (and not novel – it’s “mobile-first”) is in the footnotes:
The reason I think we were correct to design Vesper for iPhone first, before designing the Mac version, is because mobile is more limited. There are technical constraints and screen real estate constraints. A Mac app can do anything an iOS app can do; the opposite is not true. By designing the iPhone app first, we’d be far more likely to avoid the mistake of adding features in the Mac version that were difficult or impossible to do on iOS. Any app you intend to bring to mobile should be designed for mobile first.
Anyway, I think there is a lot of good insight in this long piece by Gruber and it’s well-worth reading if the app business might be your game.
There’s still a strong market for paid-up-front Mac apps, but with mobile apps, you really have to treat them more like websites: free to use, with either advertising, paid extras, or both.
A wide-ranging interview with Tim Cook this past weekend at the Washington Post, with a look back on the encryption fight with the FBI:
With the fight with the FBI, did you have any idea what you were getting into? The lightbulb went off, and it became clear what was right when we did the first piece of work: Could we create a tool to unlock the phone? After a few days, we had determined yes, we could. Then the question was, ethically, should we?… The risk of what happens if it got out, we felt, could be incredibly terrible for public safety.
We knew the positioning on the outside would not be public safety. It would be security vs. privacy — security should win. But we went through the deep, deep, deep discussions on that. It became clear that the trade-off, so to speak, was essentially putting hundreds of millions of people at risk for a phone that may or may not have anything on it, and that likely didn’t, because of other things that we knew about. We thought this actually is a clear decision. A hard one, but a clear one. Then it became more of a matter of how do we explain this. Because this is not easy. You can imagine. You just hear: locked phone. Terrorist. People dead. Why aren’t you unlocking this?
The optics of the situation was exploited by the FBI, for sure. I give Apple credit for making the decision to take this on knowing that public perception could have easily turned against the company for doing it.
Did the FBI fight change how you view the mandate of your job? Customers should have an expectation that they shouldn’t need a PhD in computer science to protect themselves. So I think they depend on us to do some things on their behalf. So with that responsibility comes an obligation to stand up. And, in this case, it was unbelievably uncomfortable and not something that we wished for, wanted — we didn’t even think it was right. Honestly? I was shocked that they would even ask for this. That was the thing that was so disappointing that I think everybody lost in the whole thing. There are 200-plus other countries in the world. Zero of them had ever asked this.
It’s easy to be cynical about any large company’s motives. We assume big corporations are always profit-driven, or complying with regulations… anything to keep them humming along without jeopardizing their ability to continue making money. But Apple had a lot to lose in this battle with the FBI when they took what was truly a principled stand.
The privacy vs. security debate will come up again, and it’s still not clear how the privacy vs. marketing debate (vis-à-vis how companies like Google and Facebook mine and reveal information about us, compared to Apple’s clear stance against this) will play out. But it would be hard for anyone to argue that Apple is not doing what they believe is right on these issues.
Microsoft leaked the golden keys that unlock Windows-powered tablets, phones and other devices sealed by Secure Boot – and is now scrambling to undo the blunder.
It’s akin to giving special secret keys to the police and the Feds that grant investigators full access to people’s devices and computer systems. Such backdoor keys can and most probably will fall into the wrong hands: rather than be used exclusively for fighting crime, they will be found and exploited by criminals to compromise communications and swipe sensitive personal information.
This is exactly what Apple and security experts have warned about regarding the FBI’s push for technology companies to allow them to access communications that would be encrypted.
Anyone who thinks government servers holding these keys are safe need only be reminded of the OPM megahack; anyone who thinks these keys cannot be extracted from software or hardware need only spend a weekend with a determined reverse-engineer and a copy of IDA Pro.
“This is a perfect real world example about why your idea of backdooring cryptosystems with a ‘secure golden key’ is very bad,” Slipstream wrote, addressing the FBI in particular.
The other thing to pick up from all this is how tenacious and therefore effective researchers and hackers are at finding these vulnerabilities. Companies go to extreme measures to get security right, and if they overlook anything, it is usually discovered and often exploited. Think the U.S. government can do better? I don’t.
Eddy Cue: The first thing to know about Maps is there’s no one developing maps in a significant way except us and Google. There’s Nokia, and then you’ve got TomTom, which is a relatively small company selling to cars. Even when you hear of a company like Uber doing that, everyone is doing it with a very narrow focus. We use maps in a very, very broad way, and so do our customers.
Federighi: …There’s a huge data-quality issue there, and I don’t think we initially appreciated all the kinds of technology we would need to do that on an ongoing basis. Going through that lesson in a very public way gave us all the motivation we needed to say we’re going to do this really well.
I think they need a little more motivation.
Some common use cases for me, which I don’t think Apple thinks about very much, are outdoor activities like hiking and fishing. A typical example of Apple Maps vs. Google Maps for a place I might visit (this is similar when comparing the Apple Maps Mac app to the Google Maps website, as well as comparing each company’s iOS app):
Apple Maps (above)
Google Maps (above)
Even zooming in, Apple Maps does not show the parks, state game lands, preserves, or campgrounds. At this level, it also does not show the streams like Google Maps does, but zooming in a little more reveals them. Not only that, but Google Maps has a terrain feature which renders nicely shaded and very usable topographic maps. Try it yourself. Apple has nothing like that.
This is by no means an exhaustive comparison. For many people, directions and common points of interest are all they want from apps like this, and from my experience Apple has certainly matched Google in those areas. I also like the simpler Apple Maps interface much better than either Google’s website or iOS app (I have cropped out the Google Maps left-panel muck in the shot above). But Google has done so much more with their mapping data, and it really shows.
Is it possible for Apple to catch up to Google with mapping? Sure, but it will be a long road and I’m not sure Apple is committed to matching Google for all types of geographic data.
Now that I’ve been using Jekyll categories on this site for a few months, I decided I needed a page to list all of the categories I have. Implementing this was a pretty simple task, but there are a couple of things I had to do that were not obvious.
The categories generator plugin I adapted from the Jekyll site does the following: it creates a subfolder in the _site output folder named categories, and it builds a page for each category that lists all posts in that category. What it does not do is create the page I need that lists all of the categories used on the site.
To create the categories list page, I supposed I could have done this by further modifying the plugin. However, since the new page is simply a list of links to each specific category page, this seems to be something best handled with Jekyll’s Liquid templating.
The first thing to do is create a categories folder in the main site’s dev folder. Then, create an index.md file and build the categories list:
---
layout: page
title: Categories
---
{% for category in site.categories %}
<p><ahref="/categories/{{ category | first }}">{{ category | first }}</a> <spanclass="badge rounded">{{ category[1].size }}</span></p>
{% endfor %}
The bit that messed me up at first was how to get the name of the category. You’ll see above that the way to do this, thanks to a post on Stack Overflow, is to use category[0], or “better,” category | first. I thought it was simply category, but that outputs the full category array element, which includes the content of every post in the category – not what I want! What I want is the category title, which is the first element in the category array. Now that I understand this and how to use Liquid filters a little better, this makes sense.
The other piece was to have a link to the new categories page on the site’s main menu. I handled that by adding the new page to the pages list in the _config.yml file:
And the menu is built using the pages_list collection in the default.html layout:
{% for page in site.pages_list %}
<small><ahref="{{ page[1] }}">{{ page[0] }}</a></small>
{% endfor %}
So now, at build time, the main /categories/index.html page is created from /categories/index.md, the categories plugin continues to generate individual category pages in the categories folder, and the menu has a link to the new page. It all works fine and was pretty simple, with the small caveats (or rather, things I learned) described.
Apple Maps (above)
Google Maps (above)