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Walt Mossberg:
\n\n\n\n\nThis is my last weekly column for The Verge and Recode — the last\nweekly column I plan to write anywhere. I’ve been doing these\nalmost every week since 1991, starting at the Wall Street Journal,\nand during that time, I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know\nthe makers of the tech revolution, and to ruminate — and\nsometimes to fulminate — about their creations.
\n\nNow, as I prepare to retire at the end of that very long and\nworld-changing stretch, it seems appropriate to ponder the\nsweep of consumer technology in that period, and what we can\nexpect next.
\n
Godspeed on whatever’s next, Walt.
\n\nInteresting video by Nick Murray, discussing the merits of Alcantara, the synthetic suede-like product that Microsoft has used for their new Surface Laptop. Murray is coming from the perspective of Alcantara’s use in cars, not laptops, but he says it wears terribly on things you touch, like steering wheels and gear shifters, losing all its softness after just a few thousand miles. This might bode poorly for the Surface Laptop.
\n\nWatch the video and read this. I’ll update this post with my comments later today.
\n\nUpdate: OK, so my take on this is going to upset many of you. I first saw this last night via this tweet from Marco Arment, and I read through the replies and every single one of them was mocking either the entire premise of an exquisite hourglass or at the very least the price.
\n\nI think this looks beautiful, and I don’t think there’s anything crazy about it costing $12,000. I’m not buying one. But all sorts of pieces of art cost tens of thousands of dollars, and I say this is most definitely art. Newson’s previous hourglass design, for Ikepod, ranged from $13,000–40,000.
\n\nI do find it odd that every unit is numbered “1/100” rather than giving each piece a unique number — “1/100”, “2/100”, … “100/100”. And Hodinkee isn’t doing themselves any favors with some of the precious bits of copywriting (e.g. “approximately 1,249,996 little spheres” is not an approximation). But if you don’t see anything ludicrous about a mechanical watch costing in excess of $10,000 (or $100,000, or more) why is there something ludicrous about a $12,000 hourglass?
\n\nThe world is full of cheaply-made mass-produced crap. Why not celebrate the creation of something genuinely beautiful?
\n\nThis is so well done it gave me goosebumps. Makes me think the franchise could use some Moore-like suaveness when they recast the role post-Craig.
\n\nJames Whitbrook, writing for io9:
\n\n\n\n\nMoonraker might not be the best Bond movie — it might not even\nbe the best of Moore’s time with the Bond mantle. But all these\nyears later, its goofy charm perhaps best represents the joyful\ncamp that Moore brought to his role as 007, something we will\nalways remember now that he’s gone.
\n
Over the years, my youthful resistance to campiness has faded, and my esteem for Moonraker has grown.
\n\nThe New York Daily News:
\n\n\n\n\nAt approximately 6:30 a.m. Monday, a car crash involving two\npickup trucks sent one of the vehicles inside the AnalTech\nbuilding of Newark, Del., leaving a giant hole. The truck damaged\nthe facility’s laboratory and caused an odor to emanate from the\ncavity, WDEL\nreports.
\n
Regarding the company name:
\n\n\n\n\nIn an email sent to the Houston Chronicle, a spokesperson\nrevealed, “In 1964, the company paid a marketing firm to come up\nwith a different name. They said, ‘Well, you guys do Analytical\nTechnology — why don’t you put the two words together and call it\n‘AnalTech!’”
\n\nHowever, the spokesperson admitted that “AnalTech faces certain\nchallenges because of the ‘juvenile’ humor that has developed in\nthe past few decades and current web filters that may block the\ncompany name” and has considered rebranding as a result.
\n
I don’t see anything “juvenile” about this humor. Good butt jokes are funny to all ages.
\n\n\n\nEric Petitt, writing for The Official Unofficial Firefox Blog yesterday:
\n\n\n\n\nI head up Firefox marketing, but I use Chrome every day. Works\nfine. Easy to use. Like most of us who spend too much time in\nfront of a laptop, I have two browsers open; Firefox for work,\nChrome for play, customized settings for each. There are multiple\nthings that bug me about the Chrome product, for sure, but I‘m OK\nwith Chrome. I just don’t like only being on Chrome. […]
\n\nBut talking to friends, it sounds more and more like living on\nChrome has started to feel like their only option. Edge is broken.\nSafari and Internet Explorer are just plain bad. And\nunfortunately, too many people think Firefox isn’t a modern\nalternative.
\n
In an update posted today, he walked that back:
\n\n\n\n\nIn my original post I made a personal dig about Edge, IE and\nSafari: “Edge is broken. Safari and Internet Explorer are just\nplain bad.” I’ve since deleted that sentence.
\n\nIt’s true, I personally don’t like those products, they just don’t\nwork for me. But that was probably a bit too flip. And, if it\nwasn’t obvious that those were my personal opinions as a user, not\nthose of the good folks at Firefox and Mozilla, then please accept\nmy apology.
\n
It’s easy when making an aside — and it’s clear that the central premise of this piece is about positioning Chrome as the Goliath to Firefox’s David, so references to Safari and IE are clearly asides — to conflate “I don’t like X” with “X is bad”. So I say we let it slide.1
\n\nBut I’ve been meaning to write about Safari vs. Chrome for a while, and Petitt’s jab, even retracted, makes for a good excuse.
\n\nI think Safari is a terrific browser. It remains the one and only browser for the Mac that behaves like a native Mac app through and through. It may not be the fastest browser but it is fast. And its energy performance puts Chrome to shame. If you use a Mac laptop, using Chrome instead of Safari can cost you an hour or more of battery life per day.2
\n\nBut Chrome is a terrific browser, too. It’s clearly the second-most-Mac-like browser for MacOS. It almost inarguably has the widest and deepest extension ecosystem. It has good web developer tools, and Chrome adopts new web development technologies faster than Safari does.
\n\nBut Safari’s extension model is more privacy-conscious. For many people on MacOS, the decision between Safari and Chrome probably comes down to which ecosystem you’re more invested in — iCloud or Google — for things like tab, bookmark, and history syncing. Me, personally, I’d feel lost without the ability to send tabs between my Macs and iPhone via Handoff. Update: Unbeknownst to me, Chrome fully supports Handoff with iOS devices. Nice!
\n\nIn short, Safari closely reflects Apple’s institutional priorities (privacy, energy efficiency, the niceness of the native UI, support for MacOS and iCloud technologies) and Chrome closely reflects Google’s priorities (speed, convenience, a web-centric rather than native-app-centric concept of desktop computing, integration with Google web properties). Safari is Apple’s browser for Apple devices. Chrome is Google’s browser for all devices.
\n\nI personally prefer Safari, but I can totally see why others — especially those who work on desktop machines or MacBooks that are usually plugged into power — prefer Chrome. DF readers agree. Looking at my web stats, over the last 30 days, 69 percent of Mac users visiting DF used Safari, but a sizable 28 percent used Chrome. (Firefox came in at 3 percent, and everything else was under 1 percent.)3
\n\nAs someone who’s been a Mac user long enough to remember when there were no good web browsers for the Mac, having both Safari and Chrome feels downright bountiful, and the competition is making both of them better.
\n\nWhat really struck me about Petitt’s piece wasn’t the unfounded (to my eyes) dismissal of Safari, but rather his admission that he uses “Firefox for work, Chrome for play”. I really doubt the marketing managers for Chrome or Safari spend their days with a rival browser open for “play”, and even if they did, I expect they’d have the common sense not to admit so publicly, and especially not in the opening paragraph of a piece arguing that their own browser is a viable alternative to the rival one. ↩︎
\nBack in December, when Consumer Reports rushed out their sensational report claiming bizarrely erratic battery life on the then-new MacBook Pros (which was eventually determined to be caused by a bug in Safari that Apple soon fixed), I decided to try to loosely replicate their test on the MacBook Pro review units I had from Apple. Consumer Reports doesn’t reveal the exact details of their testing, but they do describe it in general. They set the laptop brightness to a certain brightness value, then load a list of web pages repeatedly until the battery runs out. Presumably they automate this with a script of some sort, but they don’t say.
\n\nThat’s pretty easy to replicate in AppleScript. I used that day’s leading stories on TechMeme as my source for URLs to load — 26 URLs total. When a page loads, my script waits 5 seconds, and then scrolls down (simulating the Page Down key), waits another 5 seconds and pages down again, and then waits another 5 seconds before paging down one last time. This is a simple simulation of a person actually reading a web page. While running through the list of URLs, my script leaves each URL open in a tab. At the end of the list, it closes all tabs and then starts all over again. Each time through the loop the elapsed time and remaining battery life are logged to a file. (I also logged results as updates via messages sent to myself via iMessage, so I could monitor the progress of the hours-long test runs from my phone. No apps were running during the tests other than Safari, Script Editor, Finder, and Messages.)
\n\nI set the display brightness at exactly 68.75 percent for each test (11/16 clicks on the brightness meter when using the function key buttons to adjust), a value I chose arbitrarily as a reasonable balance for someone running on battery power.
\n\nAveraged (and rounded) across several runs, I got the following results:
\n\nI no longer had a new 13-inch MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar (a.k.a. the “MacBook Esc”) — I’d sent it back to Apple. I included my own personal 2014 13-inch MacBook Pro and my old 2011 MacBook Air just as points of reference. I think the Air did poorly just because it was so old and so well-used. It still has its original battery.
\n\nI saw no erratic fluctuations in battery life across runs of the test. I procrastinated on publishing the results, though, and within a few weeks the whole thing was written off with a “never mind!” when Apple fixed the bug in Safari that was causing Consumer Reports’s erratic results.
\n\nAnyway, the whole point of including these results in this footnote is that I also ran the exact same test with Chrome on the 13-inch MacBook Pro With Touch Bar. The average result: 3h:40m. That’s 1h:50m difference. On the exact same machine running the exact same test with the exact same list of URLs, the battery lasted almost exactly 1.5 times as long using Safari than Chrome.
\n\nMy test was in no way meant to simulate real-world usage. You’d have to be fueled up on some serious stimulants to read a new web page every 15 seconds non-stop for hours on end. But the results were striking. If you place a high priority on your MacBook’s battery life, you should use Safari instead of Chrome.
\n\nIf you’re interested, I’ve posted my battery testing scripts for Safari and Chrome. ↩︎︎
\nIf anyone has a good source for browser usage by MacOS users from a general purpose website like The New York Times or CNN, let me know. I honestly don’t know whether to expect that the split among DF readers is biased in favor of Safari because DF readers are more likely to care about the advantages of a native app, or biased in favor of Chrome because so many of you are web developers or even just nerdy enough to install a third-party browser in the first place. Wikimedia used to publish stats like that, but alas, ceased in 2015. ↩︎︎
\nAmazing story from Marc Haynes about meeting Roger Moore as a 7-year-old in 1983.
\n\n(This tweet I’m linking to has screenshots of Haynes’s post on Facebook; here’s the same story in text copied and pasted into a forum, without attribution. Have I ever complained about how much I dislike Facebook?)
\n\nDr. Drang, after adding JSON Feed support for both his blog publishing engine and his homegrown feed reader:
\n\n\n\n\nJSON Feed, for all its advantages, may be a flash in the pan. Not\nonly do bloggers and publishing platforms have to adopt it, so do\nthe major aggregator/reader services like Feedly and Digg and the\nanalytics services like FeedPress and FeedBurner. But even if JSON\nFeed doesn’t take off, the time I spent adding it to my blog and\naggregator was so short I won’t regret it.
\n
Again I say: easier to generate, easier to parse.
\n\nUpdate: Rob Wells on adding JSON feed to his site:
\n\n\n\n\nI think this is what all the people complaining on the Hacker News\nthread missed. Working in JSON is comfortable and familiar — the\ntools are good and you get told when something goes wrong. Working\nwith XML can be unclear and a bit of a pain, and creating an\ninvalid document is a risk.
\n\nSo my super-duper advanced JSON Feed implementation is…\nconstructing a
\ndict
, adding things to it and passing it off to\nthe JSON module that I use all the time. Taken care of.
I do something similar to what Wells and Drang do. DF’s RSS and Atom XML feeds are generated via templates: skeleton XML documents with tokens and loop constructs where the actual content gets filled in. But for JSON Feed I just build a Perl data structure that maps exactly to the JSON Feed spec, and just call a single function from the standard JSON module and it gets printed. That’s it. A template would add complexity.
\n\nBen Ubois, announcing support for JSON Feed in Feedbin:
\n\n\n\n\nOne of the criticisms I’ve seen of JSON Feed is that there’s no\nincentive for feed readers to support JSON Feed. This is not true.\nOne of the largest-by-volume support questions I get is along the\nlines of “Why does this random feed not work?” And, 95% of the\ntime, it’s because the feed is broken in some subtle way. JSON\nFeed will help alleviate these problems, because it’s easier to\nget right.
\n\nI also want JSON Feed to succeed because I remember how daunting\nRSS/Atom parsing were when building Feedbin. If JSON Feed was the\ndominant format back then, it would have been a non-issue.
\n
Easier to generate and easier to parse — that’s the whole point of JSON Feed in a nut.
\n\nSamuel Clay, founder of NewsBlur:
\n\n\n\n\nStarting today, NewsBlur now officially supports the new JSON Feed\nspec. And there’s nothing extra you have to do. This means if a\nwebsite syndicates their stories with the easy-to-write and\neasy-to-read JSON format, you can read it on NewsBlur. It should\nmake no difference to you, since you’re reading the end product.\nBut to website developers everywhere, supporting JSON Feeds is so\nmuch easier than supporting XML-based RSS/Atom.
\n
According to Clay, there are 15,000 NewsBlur users who subscribe to Daring Fireball. It’s very cool to see a feed reader that popular adopt JSON Feed so quickly.
\n\nThe DF RSS feed isn’t going anywhere, so if you’re already subscribed to it, there’s no need to switch. But JSON Feed’s spec makes it possible for me to specify both a url
that points to the post on Daring Fireball (i.e. the permalink) and an external_url
that points to the article I’m linking to. The way I’ve dealt with that in the RSS (technically Atom, but that’s sort of beside the point) is a bit of a hack that’s caused problems with numerous feed readers over the years.
Worth a re-link today: Roger Moore, two years ago, writing for The Guardian:
\n\n\n\n\nThe sad fact is that I know exactly how to make a dry martini but I\ncan’t drink them because, two years ago, I discovered I was\ndiabetic. I prefer one with gin, but James Bond liked a vodka\nmartini, “shaken not stirred” — which I never said, by the way.\nThat was Sean Connery, remember him?
\n\nThe worst martini I’ve ever had was in a club in New Zealand,\nwhere the barman poured juice from a bottle of olives into the\nvodka. That’s called a dirty martini and it is a dirty, filthy,\nrotten martini, and should not be drunk by anybody except\ncondemned prisoners.
\n\nMy dry martinis taste amazing and the day they tell me I’ve got 24\nhours to live I am going to have six. Here’s how I make them.
\n
I hope he had all six yesterday.
\n\nChris Murphy, writing for CNN back in 2013 on the “greatest James Bond scene of all time”:
\n\n\n\n\nDespite this wealth of choice, a series of Bond experts, and one\nof the film’s legendary producers, are in no doubt as to which\nscene should be anointed the best ever.
\n\nAnd given the recurring role that skiing has played throughout the\nlife of Bond, it should comes as no surprise our panel’s chosen\nencounter occurs on the slopes. “I would argue the most iconic\nsequence is in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, when Bond shot straight off\nthe edge of a cliff at Baffin Island in Canada,” Ajay Chowdhury,\neditor of the James Bond International Fan Club, told CNN.
\n\n“We saw him fall and fall, and when the Union Jack parachute\nopened up and the theme tune kicked in, the world cheered.
\n\n“That was Britain’s Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee Year in 1977 and I\nthink to this day it was (famous Bond producer) Albert ‘Cubby’\nBroccoli’s favorite ever scene in a Bond movie.
\n\n“When everything cleared it was him, on his own against the world.\nYou play that sequence around the world and it is James Bond. And\nhe did it on skis.”
\n
That opening scene in The Spy Who Loved Me is also the one where Bond is wearing a digital Seiko watch that can receive secure text messages from MI6 — at the time, sheer fantasy; today, a feature many of you reading this now have on your own watch. (Albeit without the ticker tape.)
\n\nI don’t know if it’s the single best Bond scene of all time, but it’s up there, and it’s almost certainly the best Bond stunt of all time — stuntman Rick Sylvester actually skied off that cliff and parachuted to safety. I just love how the fall takes place in silence.
\n\nWithout hesitation I would put The Spy Who Loved Me at the top of my list of Roger Moore’s Bond films. It has everything: the aforementioned great opening, an iconic car (the submarine-convertible white Lotus Esprit1), a great villain (Jaws), and a perfect theme song (Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better”). Bernard Lee was still in the role as M. And at the center of it all, Roger Moore at his cool, suave, and assured best.
\n\nMoore was quite self-aware of what he brought to the role. His take, in a 2014 interview with NPR, is exactly right:
\n\n\n\n\nI look like a comedic lover, and Sean [Connery] in particular, and\nDaniel Craig now, they are killers. They look like killers. I\nwouldn’t like to meet Daniel Craig on a dark night if I’d said\nanything bad about him.
\n
Moore’s Bond had fun doing his job.
\n\nA terrific and much-loved actor, but also by all accounts a good man.
\n\n“Who’s your favorite James Bond?” is a fun game to play, because there’s no wrong answer. I have at least two friends who swear their answer is Lazenby. But one thing I would argue is undeniable about Moore’s run as Bond is that he was the perfect Bond for the 70s. He didn’t just keep the franchise going, he helped adapt it to the times. Sean Connery made Bond a sensation. Roger Moore turned it into a cinematic and pop-cultural institution.
\n\nNick Heer:
\n\n\n\n\nI’ve generally had pretty good luck with Spotlight on iOS, but\nI’ve long noticed that results are delayed or nonexistent after\nnot using it for a little while, particularly if I haven’t\nrebooted my phone recently. I thought I was losing my head a\nlittle bit, until I found a tip on Twitter from Anand Iyer :
\n\nSettings > General > Spotlight Search > toggle Slack off
\n
A week or so ago I ran into this, where Spotlight was running so slowly on my iPhone that it was unusable. Restarting my phone fixed the problem, but I’ll bet it was this Slack problem.
\n\nUpdate: Sounds like there might be widespread problems with Spotlight indexing on iOS 10, because a bunch of readers have written to say they have the same problem but don’t even have Slack installed.
\n\nUpdate 2: Several readers are saying this was a bug in iOS 10.3.1 but has been fixed in last week’s 10.3.2 update.
\n\nNice profile of Anker by Nick Statt for The Verge:
\n\n\n\n\nSo in airports, the back of cabs, and on city streets we’re\nplugging into lithium-ion slabs in our pockets and bags to stay\nconnected. The market for portable battery packs generated $360\nmillion in the 12 months ending in March, 2017 in the US alone.\nThe brands behind these packs are largely anonymous — Kmashi,\nJackery, and iMuto — and they often stay that way.
\n\nExcept Anker. The steady rise of the company’s profile is proof\nthat it’s possible to meet one very specific consumer need and\nride that wave as it continues to ripple out to other markets. A\nmajority of Anker’s sales come from cables and wall chargers, and\nit’s now moving into the smart home and auto market — anywhere a\nplug and a cable can solve a problem.
\n
It’s always satisfying to see a company thrive by focusing on making great products.
\n\nNew podcast from the inimitable Craig Mod about the art of making books. The first episode is an interview with Jan Chipchase:
\n\n\n\n\nResearcher and author Jan Chipchase has a new book — “The Field\nStudy Handbook.” We discuss how he came to produce this 500+ page\nmagnum opus — a distillation of his life’s work — and why he is\nself publishing.
\n
Ben Thompson, in praise of Google’s “boring” I/O keynote:
\n\n\n\n\nGoogle Assistant has a long ways to go, but there is a clear\npicture of what success will look like: Google Photos. Launched\nonly two years ago, Pichai bragged that Photos now has over 500\nmillion active users who upload 1.2 billion photos a day. This is\na spectacular number for one very simple reason: Google Photos is\nnot the default photo app for Android or iOS. Rather, Google has\nearned all of those photos simply by being better than the\ndefaults, and the basis of that superiority is Google’s machine\nlearning.
\n\nMoreover, much like search, Photos gets better the more data it\ngets, creating a virtuous cycle: more photos means more data which\nmeans a better experience which means more users which means more\nphotos. It is already hard to see other photo applications\ncatching up.
\n
Google Photos is Google at its best. Their visual recognition is clearly the best in the world right now, and Thompson makes a good point that the “virtuous circle” makes it difficult for anyone to catch up.
\n\nIn addition to being a great product, technically, Google Photos also launched with a terrific ad campaign.
\n\nOwen Philips, writing for The Awl:
\n\n\n\n\nFortunately, Tim Lybarger, a 40 year-old high school counselor\nfrom just outside of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, wondered the same\nthing a few years ago. Back in 2011, on his blog devoted to all\nthings Mister Rogers, neighborhoodarchive.com, Lybarger recorded\nthe color of every sweater Rogers wore in each episode between\n1979 and 2001. “When I realized such a resource didn’t exist,”\nLybarger told me over email, “I just felt like somebody needed to\ndo it…might as well be me.”
\n\nThe chart below uses the data Lybarger meticulously collected to\nshow how Rogers’ preferences for the color of his cardigan changed\nover time.
\n
When I was a kid I simply loved Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. (Via Kottke, of course.)
\n\nHere’s an interesting exchange in a Hacker News discussion about my criticism of AMP over the weekend. Malte Ubl, creator and tech lead of Google AMP:
\n\n\n\n\nWith respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple\nabout that (we didn’t implement scrolling ourselves, just use a\ndiv with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that\ncase the same as the normal scrolling.
\n\nApple’s response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling\nlike the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all\npages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)
\n
“Om2”, who seemingly works on WebKit for Apple added:
\n\n\n\n\nIn current iOS Safari, webpage scrolling is inconsistent from all\nother scrolling on the system. This was an intentional decision\nmade long ago. In addition, overflow areas are consistent with the\nrest of the system, and thus inconsistent with top-level webpage\nscrolling. This is semi-accidental. In reviewing scroll rates, we\nconcluded that the original reason was no longer a good tradeoff.\nThus this change, which removed all the inconsistencies:\nhttps://trac.webkit.org/changeset/211197/webkit
\n\nHaving all scrolling be consistent feels good once you get\nused to it.
\n\nThat doesn’t necessarily mean it was a good idea for Google’s\nhosted AMP pages to use overflow scroll all along. The\ninconsistency definitely did feel weird. And the way they do\nscrolling prevents Safari from auto-hiding its top and bottom\nbars. I believe all the desired scroll effects could have been\nachieved without the use of overflow scroll.
\n
That’s a pretty big change, but I’ll bet Om2 is right that it soon feels normal. Web views have had different scrolling inertia than other scrolling views ever since the original iPhone. (My beef with scrolling in AMP is not that AMP’s fast scrolling is bad and Mobile Safari’s current slower scrolling is good, but rather that scrolling in AMP pages should not feel totally different than regular web pages. And I forgot to complain about the fact that AMP’s weird implementation also breaks Mobile Safari’s ability to hide the bottom and top browser chrome toolbars. Update: One more complaint: AMP breaks Safari’s Reader mode.)
\n\nFirst native app I’ve seen with support for JSON Feed. Pretty interesting take on a modern Mac feed reader, including nice support for using the keyboard arrow keys to move around the UI.
\n\nFlow is simple project management for busy teams. It’s the easiest way to run your team, manage projects, track tasks, and stay up to date with everything happening at work.
\n\nTeams choose Flow when email, sticky notes, and to-do apps aren’t enough, but complex project management tools are overkill. Flow’s world-class design team has worked with companies like Apple, Slack, TED, and Starbucks, so it’s simple, beautiful, and easy to use. Your team will love using it, and pick it up in minutes — not weeks.
\n\nVisit getflow.com/daringfireball to start your free trial today, and save 20% on a monthly plan, or 30% on an annual plan at checkout.
\n\nNew documentary from Hulu on George Lazenby, who played James Bond in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and then turned down an offer for a six-picture contract. Watched it over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it.
\n\nMy thanks to Stashword for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Stashword is simple but feature-rich password manager for iOS and the web. In addition to passwords, Stashword can securely save notes, financial information, and more. You can even scan and save documents like your drivers license, insurance documentation, and passport.
\n\nStashword is free to try for 15 days. Paid membership enables you to synchronize across all your devices and their website. As a special offer for Daring Fireball readers, through May 25 annual membership is just $7.99, which is 20 percent off the regular price.
\n\nFederico Viticci:
\n\n\n\n\nI’ve been thinking about some of these ideas since iOS 9 (you can\nsee a thread between my iOS 10 concept and this year’s version),\nwhile others would be a natural evolution for iOS on the iPad.\nOnce again, Sam was able to visualize everything with a fantastic\nconcept that, I believe, captures the iPad’s big-picture potential\nmore accurately than last year.
\n\nBelow, you’ll find our iOS 11 for iPad concept video, followed by\nan analysis of my iPad wishes with static mockups. I focused on\nfoundational changes to the iPad’s software — tentpole features\nthat would affect the entire OS and app ecosystem.
\n\nThis isn’t a prediction of what Apple will announce at WWDC; it’s\nmy vision for what the future of the iPad should be.
\n
Viticci and Beckett put months of work into this, and it shows. Some of the ideas they present: system-wide drag-and-drop, a Finder app, a redesigned App Store, and much more.
\n\nThe best part of this feature isn’t any specific idea, but rather Viticci’s profound enthusiasm for the iPad as a platform.
\n\nAmy Tenderich, 10 years ago, in an open letter to Steve Jobs:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIf insulin pumps or continuous monitors had the form of an iPod\nNano, people wouldn’t have to wonder why we wear our “pagers” to\nour own weddings, or puzzle over that strange bulge under our\nclothes. If these devices wouldn’t start suddenly and incessantly\nbeeping, strangers wouldn’t lecture us to turn off our “cell\nphones” at the movie theater.
\n\nIn short, medical device manufacturers are stuck in a bygone era;\nthey continue to design these products in an engineering-driven,\nphysician-centered bubble. They have not yet grasped the concept\nthat medical devices are also life devices, and therefore need to\nfeel good and look good for the patients using them 24/7, in\naddition to keeping us alive.
\n
This was incredibly prescient, given the rumors that Apple is working on continuous non-invasive glucose monitoring for Apple Watch. Jobs didn’t live to see it, but I think it’s exactly the sort of thing he would be pushing for if he were still alive.
\n\nFrom chapter 37 of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs:
\n\n\n\n\nEven when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came\nthrough. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over\nhis face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs ripped it off and\nmumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though\nbarely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different\noptions for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. The\ndoctors looked at Powell, puzzled. She was finally able to\ndistract him so they could put on the mask. He also hated the\noxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly\nand too complex. He suggested ways it could be designed more\nsimply. “He was very attuned to every nuance of the environment\nand objects around him, and that drained him,” Powell recalled.
\n
Scott Gilbertson, writing for The Register:
\n\n\n\n\nQuite a few high-profile web developers have this year weighted in\nwith criticism and some, following a Google conference dedicated\nto AMP, have cautioned users about diving in with both feet.
\n\nThese, in my view, don’t go far enough in stating the problem and\nI feel this needs to be said very clearly: Google’s AMP is bad —\nbad in a potentially web-destroying way. Google AMP is bad news\nfor how the web is built, it’s bad news for publishers of credible\nonline content, and it’s bad news for consumers of that content.\nGoogle AMP is only good for one party: Google. Google, and\npossibly, purveyors of fake news.
\n\nIt’s time for developers to wake up and, as Jason Scott once said\nof Facebook, stop: “Shoveling down the shit sherbet” Google is now\nserving with AMP.
\n
I’m on the record as being strongly opposed to AMP simply on the grounds of publication independence. I’d stand by that even if the implementation were great. But the implementation is not great — it’s terrible. Yes, AMP pages load fast, but you don’t need AMP for fast-loading web pages. If you are a publisher and your web pages don’t load fast, the sane solution is to fix your fucking website so that pages load fast, not to throw your hands up in the air and implement AMP.
\n\nBut other than loading fast, AMP sucks. It implements its own scrolling behavior on iOS, which feels unnatural, and even worse, it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view. AMP also completely breaks Safari’s ability to search for text on a page (via the “Find on Page” action in the sharing sheet). Google has no respect for the platform. If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages. It’s a deliberate effort by Google to break the open web.
\n\nDamian Carrington, reporting for The Guardian:
\n\n\n\n\nIt was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the\nworld’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure\nhumanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried\nin a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached\nafter global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the\nwinter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.
\n
The big takeaway from this should be that climate change truly is a threat to civilization. But, I have to say, that melting permafrost wasn’t taken into consideration during the design of this vault seems like a glaring oversight.
\n\nUpdate: Looks like The Guardian might have shamelessly sensationalized this story. Mary Beth Griggs, reporting for Popular Science:
\n\n\n\n\n“If there was a worst case scenario where there was so much water,\nor the pumping systems failed, that it made its way uphill to the\nseed vault, then it would encounter minus 18 [degrees celsius] and\nfreeze again. Then there’s another barrier [the ice] for entry\ninto the seed vault,” Fowler says. In other words, any water that\nfloods into the tunnel has to make it 100 meters downhill, then\nback uphill, then overwhelm the pumping systems, and then manage\nnot to freeze at well-below-freezing temperatures. Otherwise,\nthere’s no way liquid is getting into the seed bank — so the\nseeds are probably safe. […]
\n\nStill worried? Maybe this will help you exhale: “We did this\ncalculation; if all the ice in the world melted — Greenland,\nArctic, Antarctic, everything — and then we had the world’s\nlargest recorded tsunami right in front of the seed vault. So,\nvery high sea levels and the worlds largest Tsunami. What would\nhappen to the seed vault?” Fowler says. “We found that the seed\nvault was somewhere between a five and seven story building above\nthat point. It might not help the road leading up to the seed\nvault, but the seeds themselves would be OK.”
\n
Sounds like the vault itself is designed to survive a climate apocalypse — it’s just the entry that isn’t.
\n\nNiclas Darville, on creating a JSON Feed template for Jekyll:
\n\n\n\n\nIt literally took me longer to write this blog post than the JSON\nfeed code, because I couldn’t get Jekyll to escape the Liquid code\nexample.
\n
On Twitter, Darville wrote:
\n\n\n\n\nOne of the best things about @jsonfeed is how well it works as a\nHello World kind of programming exercise.
\n\nSure beats to-do lists.
\n
Jason McIntosh described adding JSON Feed support to his home-grown blog engine as a “blowing-off-steam project”.
\n\nThese reactions are exactly what I mean about JSON Feed being fun. There’s a time and place for specs that are drop-dead serious, but I think it’s often overlooked just how important fun can be in having a new spec gain traction.
\n\nActual headline in the staid New York Times: “Trump Told Russians That Firing ‘Nut Job’ Comey Eased Pressure From Investigation”.
\n\nJason Ditzian, writing for The Bold Italic on what happened when the car sharing service he’d been using for 10 years was acquired:
\n\n\n\n\nHowever, City CarShare was recently bought by a corporation,\nGetaround. And Getaround built its platform on top of Facebook. So\nwhen I went to migrate my account over to them, I found that\nthere’s literally no way to do it as a non-Facebook user. If I\nwant to share cars with my fellow city dwellers, I’m compelled to\nstrike a Faustian bargain.
\n\nTo access the services of Getaround, one must authenticate their\nidentity through Facebook. […]
\n\nI know that for you Facebook-having people, this is no big deal.\nYou have resigned yourself to the idea of Facebook owning your\ndata. But if you don’t, haven’t and/or won’t resign to this fate,\nyou might end up left, like me, in a peculiar situation: the price\nof “sharing” a car equals money plus forking over a huge trove of\npersonal data. Personal information is supplanting money as a form\nof currency.
\n
There’s clearly a problem here, but I don’t think it’s Facebook’s fault. I think the problem is that Getaround sucks.
\n\nKarl Bode, writing for TechDirt:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSurprising absolutely nobody, the FCC today voted 2-1 along strict\nparty lines to begin dismantling net neutrality protections for\nconsumers. The move comes despite the fact that the vast\nmajority of non-bot comments filed with the FCC support\nkeeping the rules intact. And while FCC boss Ajit Pai has\nbreathlessly insisted he intended to listen to the concerns of all\nparties involved, there has been zero indication that this was a\nserious commitment as he begins dismantling all manner of\nbroadband consumer protections, not just net neutrality.
\n\nAs you might have expected, the FCC was quick to release a\nstatement claiming that gutting the popular consumer protections\nwould usher forth a magical age of connectivity, investment, and\ninnovation.
\n
One of my very favorite songs from Chris Cornell — the opening credits theme to Casino Royale. A great song that just fits the movie so damn well.
\n\nThe New York Times:
\n\n\n\n\nChris Cornell, the powerful, dynamic singer whose band Soundgarden\nwas one of the architects of grunge music, died on Wednesday night\nin Detroit hours after the band had performed there. He was 52.
\n\nThe death was a suicide by hanging, the Wayne County Medical\nExaminer’s Office said in a statement released on Thursday\nafternoon. It said a full autopsy had not yet been completed.
\n
Fuck.
\n\nThere’s a cool command-line JSON processor called jq
— easily installed on a Mac via download or Homebrew, and even more easily tinkered with using the online playground. Here’s how easy jq
makes it to get, say, a list of the titles from DF’s JSON feed:
curl -s https://daringfireball.net/feeds/json | jq '.items[].title'\n
\n\nMaxime Vaillancourt:
\n\n\n\n\nHere’s a tiny proof of concept for a @jsonfeed viewer, built in an\nhour: http://json-feed-viewer.herokuapp.com
\n
One of the things I love about JSON Feed is that it’s fun. JSON is so simple, and so well-supported by almost all programming languages, that you can build something interesting in just a few minutes, and something useful in an hour. There was a comment on the Hacker News thread about JSON Feed that I loved:
\n\n\n\n\nIt is very likely than I am an idiot, but I’ve always found\nparsing XML too hard, specially compared to JSON which is almost\ntoo easy.
\n
“Almost too easy” are three words no one has ever said about XML.
\n\nChristina Farr, reporting for CNBC:
\n\n\n\n\nTim Cook has been spotted at the Apple campus test-driving a\ndevice that tracks blood sugar, which was connected to his\nApple Watch.
\n\nA source said that Cook was wearing a prototype glucose-tracker on\nthe Apple Watch, which points to future applications that would\nmake the device a “must have” for millions of people with diabetes\n— or at risk for the disease.
\n\nAs CNBC reported last month, Apple has a team in Palo Alto\nworking on the “holy grail” for diabetes: Non-invasive and\ncontinuous glucose monitoring. The current glucose trackers on the\nmarket rely on tiny sensors penetrating the skin. Sources said the\ncompany is already conducting feasibility trials in the Bay Area.
\n
Non-invasive continuous glucose monitoring would be a life-changer for anyone with diabetes. But I can’t even imagine how life-changing this will be for kids with diabetes and their parents.
\n\nThis sounds very cool: a one-day conference in August devoted to Mac and iOS scripting and automation, hosted by Paul Kent, Naomi Pearce, and Sal Soghoian.
\n\nKevin Hamm:
\n\n\n\n\nCaptions can be just text at timecode, which is simple. In their\nmost complex, they are styled, located text at timecode. That’s\nit. Nothing more. I work in text and titles and timecode every day\nin every video I do, so there is no reason that this simple\nfunction isn’t baked in at this point. Words at timecode. That’s\nall it is.
\n\nThat Apple is making their systems and products accessible is\ngreat. Xcode grants programmers the ability to build accessible\napps, and has from the beginning, which is even better as it makes\na massive part of the ecosystem accessible.
\n\nThat Final Cut Pro hasn’t ever and still doesn’t create closed\ncaptions is a smudge on that image.
\n
It seems bonkers to me that Final Cut Pro X doesn’t have support for closed captions. Coming from Apple, you’d think it would have excellent support for them. How does Apple create closed captions for their own videos?
\n\nSteven Frank:
\n\n\n\n\nLast week, for about three days, the macOS video transcoding app\nHandBrake was compromised. One of the two download servers for\nHandBrake was serving up a special malware-infested version of the\napp, that, when launched, would essentially give hackers remote\ncontrol of your computer.
\n\nIn a case of extraordinarily bad luck, even for a guy that has a\nlot of bad computer luck, I happened to download HandBrake in that\nthree day window, and my work Mac got pwned.
\n\nLong story short, somebody, somewhere, now has quite a bit of\nsource code to several of our apps.
\n
This is one hell of a story and quite a shock, but the crew at Panic kept their heads together and did the right thing: they’ve opened up completely and honestly, refused to deal with the blackmailer, and I think they are correctly unworried about their source code being leaked publicly.
\n\nFascinating behind-the-scenes look at The Tonight Show, including a look inside Fallon’s briefcase (he’s got a Nintendo Switch in there).
\n\nBrent Simmons and Manton Reece:
\n\n\n\n\nWe — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has\nbecome the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will\noften go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read\nand write, and it’s less prone to bugs.
\n\nSo we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in\nJSON. It reflects the lessons learned from our years of work\nreading and publishing feeds.
\n
I think this is a great idea, and a good spec. I even like the style in which the spec is written: for real humans (much like the RSS spec). If you want to see a real-life example, Daring Fireball has a JSON Feed. I’ve got a good feeling about this project — the same sort of feeling I had about Markdown back in the day.
\n\nNice piece for Mashable by Katie Dupere on a bunch of new videos in Apple’s YouTube channel, highlighting real-world usage of iOS and MacOS accessibility features. People who can’t move, people who can’t talk, people who can’t see or hear — doing amazing things. Apple’s commitment to accessibility is one of my very favorite things about the company. It’s not just the right thing to do for people who truly need these features — it makes the products better for everyone.
\n\nUpdate: Jim Dalrymple has all 7 videos collected on one page.
\n\nStashword’s iOS app is a simple yet feature rich password manager trusted by thousands of users. Stashword is not just an incredible password manager, it is also a secure digital vault where you can save, organize and share notes, codes, bank information, credit cards, and more. You can even scan and save documents such as your drivers license, insurance, passport etc.
\n\nStashword is free to try for 15 days. Paid membership enables you to synchronize across all your devices and use their full-featured website www.stashword.com. For this week only, yearly membership is $7.99, which is 20 percent off the regular price.
\n\nGreat interactive feature by Farhad Manjoo for The New York Times:
\n\n\n\n\nApple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent\ncompany of Google, are not just the largest technology companies\nin the world. As I’ve argued repeatedly in my column, they are\nalso becoming the most powerful companies of any kind, essentially\ninescapable for any consumer or business that wants to participate\nin the modern world. But which of the Frightful Five is most\nunavoidable? I ponder the question in my column this week.
\n\nBut what about you? If an evil monarch forced you to choose, in\nwhat order would you give up these inescapable giants of tech?
\n
Great question. I love thought exercises.
\n\nMy order (from first dropped to last):
\n\nFacebook. I love Instagram, but could live without it. I don’t use anything else Facebook offers.
Microsoft. The only Microsoft product I use regularly is Skype, for podcasting, and I suspect I could find another solution. (If I couldn’t, I might have to rethink my answer here.)
Amazon. I buy stuff from Amazon almost every week. I just counted — 11 orders so far in 2017. My wife buys stuff from Amazon even more frequently. But just about anything we buy at Amazon, we could buy elsewhere. It’d be painful to replace, but not irreplaceable. There are a couple of shows exclusive to Amazon Prime that I enjoy, but none that I love.
Alphabet. I already use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, so giving up Google search would be frustrating at times, but not a deal breaker. I use a few email accounts backed by Gmail, but I actually dislike Gmail, and have been procrastinating on moving all my mail to FastMail for years. I despise Google Docs. I don’t use any Android devices other than as a curiosity. I greatly prefer Safari over Chrome. YouTube, however, is irreplaceable, and so essential that it pretty much singlehandedly catapults Alphabet to #4 in my list.
Apple. I mean, come on. If not for Apple I’d be stuck using computers I don’t like and a phone that I consider a distant second-best. With all the other companies on the list, what I’d miss most are certain of their services — Instagram, Skype, Amazon’s store, YouTube — but Apple is the only company in the world whose hardware I consider irreplaceable. And you need the hardware to make best use of the services from any other companies. And that doesn’t even touch upon Apple’s crown jewels: the MacOS and iOS software platforms.
Ben Thompson had a great column this week, in the wake of Apple’s quarterly results and Microsoft’s announcement of the Surface Laptop:
\n\n\n\n\nDid you hear about the new Microsoft Surface Laptop? The usual\nsuspects are claiming it’s a MacBook competitor, which is\ntrue insomuch as it is a laptop. In truth, though, the Surface\nLaptop isn’t a MacBook competitor at all for the rather obvious\nreason that it runs Windows, while the MacBook runs MacOS. This\nhas always been the foundation of Apple’s business model:\nhardware differentiated by software such that said hardware\ncan be sold with a margin much greater than nominal competitors\nrunning a commodity operating system.
\n
Hardware differentiated by superior, exclusive software is the key to understanding Apple. It’s the reason the company was founded. Apple II’s were the best personal computer hardware and had the best software. Part of why Woz is so venerated is that he was unimaginably gifted at both hardware and software. Hardware differentiated by software is how Apple survived in the late ’90s, when the company was struggling. It explains all the company’s success after that: the iPod, the resurgence of the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Any comparison between Microsoft’s Surface Laptop and Apple’s MacBooks that doesn’t place heavy emphasis on the value of MacOS is vapid.
\n\nThompson then turns to Apple’s languishing iPhone sales in China:
\n\n\n\n\nBut that is not what is going on in most of the world: plenty of\nfolks — more than last year — are happy to buy the iPhone 7,\neven though it doesn’t look much different than the iPhone 6.\nAfter all, if you need a new phone, and you want iOS, you don’t\nhave much choice! Except, again, for China: that is the country\nwhere the appearance of the iPhone matters most; Apple’s\nproblem, though, is that in China that is the only thing that\nmatters at all.
\n\nThe fundamental issue is this: unlike the rest of the world, in\nChina the most important layer of the smartphone stack is not the\nphone’s operating system. Rather, it is WeChat. Connie Chan of\nAndreessen Horowitz tried to explain in 2015 just how integrated\nWeChat is into the daily lives of nearly 900 million Chinese, and\nthat integration has only grown since then: every aspect of a\ntypical Chinese person’s life, not just online but also off is\nconducted through a single app (and, to the extent other apps are\nused, they are often games promoted through WeChat).
\n\nThere is nothing in any other country that is comparable: not\nLINE, not WhatsApp, not Facebook. All of those are about\ncommunication or wasting time: WeChat is that, but it is also for\nreading news, for hailing taxis, for paying for lunch (try and pay\nwith cash for lunch, and you’ll look like a luddite), for\naccessing government resources, for business. For all intents and\npurposes WeChat is your phone, and to a far greater extent in\nChina than anywhere else, your phone is everything.
\n
As Thompson adds in a footnote, “Or, to put it another way, the operating system of China is WeChat, not iOS/Android.”
\n\nThompson cites a staggering statistic: among existing iPhone users in China who bought a new phone in 2016, only 50 percent of them bought another iPhone. That is an incredible statistical outlier compared to iPhone users in the rest of the world, where Apple’s retention rates hover around the mid-80s.
\n\nHere’s a Business Insider report from November of last year, with retention statistics from 2014 through 2016 from UBS analysts Steven Milunovich and Benjamin Wilson. Business Insider leads with the iPhone’s slowly declining retention rate globally, but the real story is halfway down the page, in this chart.
\n\nAccording to that research from UBS, iPhone retention rates hover in the mid-to-high 80s in the U.S., U.K., and Germany. In Japan they’re in the mid-70s, but holding roughly steady. China’s numbers have plummeted — and these numbers from UBS (in the mid-50s for Q4 2016) are in line with the 50 percent number in the Chinese survey Thompson cited.
\n\nSo here’s Apple’s China problem: Chinese iPhone users aren’t nearly as loyal to the iPhone platform as iPhone users elsewhere are. This is already hurting Apple financially. Apple’s Q2 2017 financial results (announced this week) were, overall, OK. But other than China, they were actually good. The drop in iPhone sales in China was so severe, and China is so big, that it singlehandedly turned a good quarter into a so-so quarter.
\n\nI subtly disagree with Ben Thompson on one point. Thompson attributes the iPhone’s slide in China to two factors:
\n\nThompson knows Chinese culture well — he lives in Taipei, visits China often, and speaks Mandarin. My grasp of Chinese culture is rudimentary at best, and I’ve never traveled to Asia. So I defer to him on the point that the iPhone as a status symbol is more important in China than it is elsewhere.
\n\nThompson, though, I think places too much weight on the fact that at a glance, some models of the iPhone 7 are indistinguishable from the iPhone 6 and 6S. Thompson argues that this is more of a problem in status-conscious China than it is elsewhere — that in China, there are many people who forego an upgrade to an iPhone 7 because other people won’t be able to tell that it isn’t, say, a boring two-year-old iPhone 6. I just don’t buy that. For one thing, the black and especially jet black iPhone 7 models are instantly recognizable as the latest and greatest.
\n\nBut more importantly, I just think the whole “if it doesn’t have an altogether new form factor, it’s boring” thing is hogwash. I wrote an entire column about this when the iPhone 7 debuted, and won’t rehash the whole argument here. But I am convinced this viewpoint is mostly that of the tech and gadget obsessed.
\n\nAgain, I’ll concede that the status symbol aspect of a high-end smartphone may well be more important in China than anywhere else in the world. But even if I also concede that the iPhone 7’s mostly-like-the-iPhone-6 form factor is a problem for the Chinese market, if the iOS platform engendered the loyalty in China that it does elsewhere, the result would be Chinese iPhone owners waiting another year for the next iPhone. Instead, according to the market research cited above, half of the Chinese iPhone owners who bought a new phone in 2016 switched to an Android device. There are some fine looking Android phones at the high end of the market, but there are none that, based on form factor alone, would explain this. And none of them have anything close to the luxury brand prestige that Apple does.
\n\nIn Apple’s “hardware differentiated by software” formula, the software is more important than the hardware. That’s why gadget writers so often get Apple wrong: they’re focused solely on hardware — the object, not the experience of using the object. That’s also why the financial press so often gets Apple wrong: they focus only on the hardware because that’s where the money comes from.
\n\nIf forced to choose, I would much rather run iOS on a Google Pixel than Android on an iPhone 7. I would rather run MacOS on a ThinkPad than Windows on a MacBook Pro.1 Whenever I bring up this thought experiment — would you rather run Apple’s software platform on non-Apple hardware or run some other software platform on Apple hardware — I get email from readers who say they actually do choose Apple products, especially MacBooks, for the hardware. I believe them, but those are the sort of customers with the least loyalty to Apple. If all you depend on is, say, Chrome, a text editor, and a terminal, it’s easy to switch to another laptop brand. If you depend on native Mac and iOS apps, iCloud, and iMessage, it’s arduous, at best, to switch.
\n\nIf it really is true that “the operating system of China is WeChat, not iOS/Android”, that’s the whole ballgame right there. Again, my disagreement with Thompson here is subtle. He even describes WeChat’s centrality to the Chinese smartphone stack as “the fundamental issue”, leaving the supposed boringness of the iPhone 6S and 7 as a secondary issue. My difference with Thompson is that I don’t think the iPhone 6S/7 hardware is a problem at all. Personally, I think the iPhone 7 is such a great phone, and the 7 Plus in particular has such a great camera, that the quality of the latest iPhone hardware, including how it looks, shows just how much of a problem it is that WeChat, not iOS, is central to the iPhone experience in China.
\n\nThat’s a real problem for Apple, because even if Thompson is right (and I’m wrong) and Apple does have a boring-looking-hardware problem in China, they can (and seem poised to) remedy that by releasing exciting new iPhone hardware this year. But if the problem is that iOS engenders far less platform loyalty in China because of WeChat’s centrality — or even worse, if WeChat is central and better on Android than it is on iOS — there’s no easy fix for Apple.
\n\nFor those of you like me, who know very little about WeChat, this 2015 piece by Connie Chan (as linked to by Thompson) is a terrific introduction: “When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China”.
\n\nI always use ThinkPads as my go-to example of high-quality PC hardware; perhaps I should start using Microsoft Surfaces? ↩︎
\nMike Murphy, writing for Quartz, “Two Years After Its Launch, the Apple Watch Hasn’t Made a Difference at Apple”:
\n\n\n\n\nApple’s biggest launch since the iPad in 2010, the Apple Watch was\nexpected to be a hit: Given the massive financial success of the\niPhone, it stood to reason that a companion device might be\nsomething customers craved.
\n\nNot so much. Apple has never shared hard numbers on how many\nwearables it has sold, and doesn’t even break out Watch sales in\nits quarterly earnings report. Instead, the device is bundled into\nApple’s “Other products,” which the company says includes, “Apple\nTV, Apple Watch, Beats products, iPod and Apple-branded and\nthird-party accessories.”
\n
These articles come out like clockwork every 3 months, as Apple’s earnings report draws near. Apple told us they were not going to report hard numbers on Apple Watch right from the start, six months before it shipped. They want to keep them secret for competitive reasons.
\n\n\n\n\nTwo years and two iterations after its launch, the Apple Watch has\nnot proven to be as indispensable as the iPhone, or even as\nlucrative as the Mac, the iPad, or Apple’s services businesses.\nIt’s unclear whether an iPhone-like overhaul, or attempts to\nmarket the watch directly to athletes or millennials, will\nultimately make a difference.
\n
(“Two years and two iterations after its launch” — I don’t know if that’s a mistake, if Murphy is counting WatchOS releases, or if he’s counting Series 1 as a full hardware iteration. But it’s sloppy writing. Most people would surely agree that there’s been only one iteration since launch, the Series 2 watches released last September.)
\n\nThe nut of every “Apple Watch is a dud” story is the fact that it’s clearly not an iPhone-size business. But that can’t be the only measure of success. The iPhone is the biggest and most successful consumer product in the history of the world. Nothing compares to the smartphone market, and it’s possible nothing else will in our lifetimes. You and I may never again see a product as profitable as the iPhone — not just from Apple, but from any company in any industry. Or maybe we will. It’s a complete unknown.
\n\nBut if Apple gets it into its head that they should only work on iPhone-sized opportunities, it would paralyze the company. In baseball terms, it’s fine for Apple to hit a bunch of singles while waiting for their next home run. According to Apple, they had more watch sales by revenue in 2015 than any company other than Rolex, and Apple’s “Other” category, which is where Watch sales are accounted for, had a near record-breaking holiday quarter three months ago, suggesting strongly that Watch sales were up over the year-ago holiday quarter.
\n\nThese two facts are both true: Apple Watch sales are a rounding error compared to the iPhone, and Apple Watch is a smash hit compared to traditional watches and other wearable devices.
\n\n\n\n " }, { "title" : "★ On Uber’s ‘Identifying and Tagging’ of iPhones", "date_published" : "2017-04-24T00:54:36Z", "date_modified" : "2017-04-24T03:19:56Z", "id" : "https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/uber_identifying_and_tagging_iphones", "url" : "https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/uber_identifying_and_tagging_iphones", "author" : { "name" : "John Gruber" }, "content_html" : "\nMike Isaac’s profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick for The New York Times contains an accusation that, on its face, sounds outrageous:
\n\n\n\n\nFor months, Mr. Kalanick had pulled a fast one on Apple by\ndirecting his employees to help camouflage the ride-hailing app\nfrom Apple’s engineers. The reason? So Apple would not find out\nthat Uber had been secretly identifying and tagging iPhones even\nafter its app had been deleted and the devices erased — a fraud\ndetection maneuver that violated Apple’s privacy guidelines.
\n\nBut Apple was on to the deception, and when Mr. Kalanick arrived\nat the midafternoon meeting sporting his favorite pair of bright\nred sneakers and hot-pink socks, Mr. Cook was prepared. “So, I’ve\nheard you’ve been breaking some of our rules,” Mr. Cook said in\nhis calm, Southern tone. Stop the trickery, Mr. Cook then\ndemanded, or Uber’s app would be kicked out of Apple’s App Store.
\n\nFor Mr. Kalanick, the moment was fraught with tension. If Uber’s\napp was yanked from the App Store, it would lose access to\nmillions of iPhone customers — essentially destroying the\nride-hailing company’s business. So Mr. Kalanick acceded.
\n
“Secretly identifying and tagging iPhones even after its app had been deleted and the devices erased” is a rather startling accusation, because it sounds like it should be technically impossible. It’s also very much unclear what information Uber was able to glean from these “identified and tagged” iPhones other than some sort of unique device identifier. Unfortunately, the Times story is very short on details here. But note that the Times is not saying Uber was “tracking” these phones. A lot of people are jumping to the conclusion that Uber was somehow tracking the location of users even after they deleted the Uber app, but the word “track” only appears in the article in the context of Kalanick having “excelled at running track and playing football” in high school.
\n\n[Update: This explains a lot, regarding the hubbub today over this story. When first published, the Times story did use the word “tracking”, but a subsequent revision changed that word to “identifying and tagging”.]
\n\nReading between the lines, it is possible — and my gut says quite probable — that Uber wasn’t doing anything on these iPhones other than when its app was installed and running on them. From the end of the article:
\n\n\n\n\nThe idea of fooling Apple, the main distributor of Uber’s app,\nbegan in 2014.
\n\nAt the time, Uber was dealing with widespread account fraud in\nplaces like China, where tricksters bought stolen iPhones that\nwere erased of their memory and resold. Some Uber drivers there\nwould then create dozens of fake email addresses to sign up for\nnew Uber rider accounts attached to each phone, and request rides\nfrom those phones, which they would then accept. Since Uber was\nhanding out incentives to drivers to take more rides, the drivers\ncould earn more money this way.
\n\nTo halt the activity, Uber engineers assigned a persistent\nidentity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called\n“fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent\nitself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its\ncontents.
\n\nThere was one problem: Fingerprinting iPhones broke Apple’s rules.\nMr. Cook believed that wiping an iPhone should ensure that no\ntrace of the owner’s identity remained on the device.
\n
What Isaac is reporting here doesn’t require any code running on an iPhone other than when the Uber app is itself installed and launched. I’m speculating here, but it could be something like this:
\n\nThe Uber app, while installed, fingerprints the device somehow, and reports the fingerprint home to Uber’s servers, where it is tied to the user’s Uber account. (All iPhones have a Unique Device Identifier — “UDID” — but Apple banned third-party apps from accessing it in 2012. Uber either found a way to access UDIDs surreptitiously, or created some other way of uniquely identifying devices even after they’ve been wiped. It would be good to know exactly what they did, but for the sake of my argument here it doesn’t matter.)
The Uber app is deleted from the device and/or device is wiped. At this point, Uber knows the fingerprint for the device, but can’t use it to track the device in any way, and they don’t care, because until someone reinstalls the Uber app on the phone it isn’t being used to book fraudulent rides.
The Uber app is reinstalled on the iPhone. When it launches, it does the fingerprint check and phones home again. Uber now knows this is the same iPhone they’ve seen before, because the fingerprint matches. This is the violation of Apple’s privacy policy.
But until step 3, when the Uber app is reinstalled, I don’t think Uber was “tracking” the phone in any way. And they didn’t care — the Times says the whole project was designed to counter fraud in China, which required the Uber app to be reinstalled on stolen iPhones.
\n\nRepeating from the opening of the article, Isaac wrote:
\n\n\n\n\nSo Apple would not find out that Uber had been secretly\nidentifying and tagging iPhones even after its app had been\ndeleted and the devices erased — a fraud detection maneuver that\nviolated Apple’s privacy guidelines.
\n
That sounds like Uber was doing the identifying and “tagging” (whatever that is) after the app had been deleted and/or the device wiped, but I think what it might — might — actually mean is merely that the identification persisted after the app had been deleted and/or the device wiped. That’s not supposed to be technically possible — iOS APIs for things like the UDID and even the MAC address stopped reporting unique identifiers years ago, because they were being abused by privacy invasive ad trackers, analytics packages, and entitled shitbags like Uber. That’s wrong, and Apple was right to put an end to it, but it’s far less sensational than the prospect of Uber having been able to identify and “tag” an iPhone after the Uber app had been deleted. The latter scenario only seems technically possible if other third-party apps were executing surreptitious code that did this stuff through Uber’s SDK, or if the Uber app left behind malware outside the app’s sandbox. I don’t think that’s the case, if only because I don’t think Apple would have hesitated to remove Uber from the App Store if it was infecting iPhones with hidden phone-home malware.
\n\nThe article does raise some questions:
\n\nWhat APIs and device info was Uber using to identify iPhones? Are these API loopholes now closed in iOS? If we don’t learn exactly what Uber was using to identify devices, we cannot know that the technique no longer works. iOS users should be able to feel confident that when they delete an app, all connections between their device and the developer of the app are disconnected, and that when they wipe a device, everything personally identifying has been removed from it.
What exactly did Apple know about Uber’s actions in this regard when Tim Cook called Kalanick in for the meeting? Was Apple aware that Uber was specifically keeping a database of unique iPhone identifiers? If so, how?
What prompted Apple to investigate Uber in this regard? And why did Uber suspect Apple was going to investigate, prompting them to geofence their fingerprinting so it wouldn’t trigger in Cupertino? (My theory: the Uber app was calling private APIs, and they used the geofence to avoid calling those private APIs while the app was in App Store review, assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that all App Store reviewers work in Cupertino. App Store review can identify apps that call private APIs.)
Update: Why didn’t Apple require Uber to disclose what they’d done as a condition for remaining in the store? Shouldn’t iPhone users who had Uber installed know about this?
[Update 2: Will Strafach examined a 2014 build of the Uber iOS app and found them using private APIs to use IOKit to pull the device serial number from the device registry. There might be more, but this alone is a blatant violation of App Store policy. Strafach confirms that the technique Uber was using no longer works in iOS 10.]
\n\nThe article also contains this non-Apple-related tidbit:
\n\n\n\n\nUber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence,\npurchasing data from an analytics service called Slice\nIntelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named\nUnroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts\nfrom their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used\nthe data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business. (Lyft, too,\noperates a competitive intelligence team.)
\n\nSlice confirmed that it sells anonymized data (meaning that\ncustomers’ names are not attached) based on ride receipts from\nUber and Lyft, but declined to disclose who buys the information.
\n
This is, needless to say, super shitty. We expect it from Uber. But Slice should be ashamed of themselves. Their Unroll.me service is billed as a tool to “Clean up your inbox” by identifying subscription emails and allowing you to unsubscribe from them in bulk. It’s “free” in the sense that you don’t pay them money, but they’re selling your personal information to companies like Uber. Supposedly that information is anonymized, but wiped iPhones are supposed to be anonymized too, and Uber found at least one route around that.
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