Opinion pieces & commentary

I’ve always loved music, and am old enough to have lived through every generation of portable music player, from the original cassette Walkman on. The transition from cassette to CD made little difference: you still only had one album loaded at any one time, and carrying others was a pain. The same was true of the very first mp3 player, the MPMan, which I bought in 1998.

The first hard drive-based mp3 player was the Personal Jukebox in 1999. It beat the iPod to market by two years, but was large, heavy and hard to use. Even as an early adopter of technology, I was only briefly tempted.

It was the launch of the iPod fifteen years ago yesterday that changed everything for me. That tagline of ‘1000 songs in your pocket’ said it all: you could now carry a substantial proportion of your entire music library on you at all times. And that changed the way that I – and millions of others around the world – listened to music …

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IBM reported some pretty impressive stats this week. Not least among them the fact that 73% of IBM employees – the company whose personal computer division was once almost synonymous with Microsoft – want a Mac as their next PC. The company is currently equipping its employees with Macs at the rate of 1300 people per week.

Indeed, IBM Japan has gone as far as making Macs standard-issue: any employee wanting a Windows machine instead has to make a special request justifying their need.

The company said that it had to overcome a number of assumptions – or prejudices – in order to make the transition …

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I love the Apple ecosystem. It’s not perfect by any means, but I’d say that the vast majority of the time it lives up to Steve’s famous ‘it just works’ promise. It’s the main reason that I have two Macs, an iPad and an iPhone.

So when a big Apple fan deliberately moves outside of that ecosystem, that’s a sign that something is very wrong. And I do so not just in one area, but two. The common theme? iCloud …

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A report from last night suggests that Apple is planning to drop the 11-inch MacBook Air when it unveils new MacBook Pro models later this month.

Macotakara has an above-average track-record, but the move would – on the face of it – seem surprising. The 11-inch Air has always served two purposes. First, it has been the machine of choice for those who want a Mac in the sleekest possible form-factor. It of course lost that role when Apple launched the 12-inch MacBook, so that side of things makes sense.

But the 11-inch machine also served a second role since the plastic MacBooks were phased out: as the entry-level machine designed to bring new customers into the Mac world. In particular, it appealed to students on a tight budget – customers whose lifetime value to Apple would be huge once hooked on Macs from a young age. It’s not a market Apple would want to abandon.

So what might Apple be planning if the rumor is true … ?

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Following speculation that Apple may be looking to acquire Sonder Keyboard, the startup yesterday confirmed to us that it has been in discussions with Apple’s procurement board. Coincidentally or not, the company’s website was not accessible at the time of writing (that may simply be yesterday’s story driving too much traffic to it, of course).

Sonder was not the first company to make a keyboard with dynamically-assigned keys. Patents for the idea go back as far as the 1970s, and the first commercially-available one was the German-made LC Board in the 1980s.

The Optimus Maximus was one of the better-known examples of the technology, later superseded by the Optimus Popularis, in which each key is an individual color LCD display. At $1500, it hasn’t exactly made it into the mainstream, and other examples have come and gone.

But Sonder’s approach has a realistic shot at making dynamic hardware keyboards a mainstream technology …

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As regular readers will know, I’m a long-time fan of Siri. It’s my default way to interact with my iPhone: from checking the weather forecast through opening apps to dictating text messages. It was the sole reason I upgraded from the iPhone 4 to the 4S back in the day.

At the same time, I’ve also long wanted Siri to do more. Last month, Apple finally granted the request I made last year: to give her access to third-party apps. But I was also hoping then for more – much more – while Apple seems to be content to expand Siri’s capabilities at a relatively leisurely pace.

Many of Siri’s original developers, it turned out, had also grown frustrated at Apple’s apparent lack of ambition for the intelligent assistant. They wanted to proceed at a much faster pace, and finally parted company with Apple to develop a next-generation assistant, Viv. The demonstration they gave back in May seriously impressed me, and I said then than Viv was what Siri should always have become …

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One of the new features of macOS Sierra is that it can automatically ‘manage storage’ on your Mac. What this means is, if you’re getting low on SSD space, macOS can automatically upload older and larger files to iCloud and then delete them from your Mac. When macOS deletes a file, it leaves an alias that will download the file from iCloud as required.

Effectively, you don’t have to worry about how much physical storage your Mac has – you can just treat it as an infinitely large drive and macOS takes care of shifting things back and forth from the cloud as required.

That’s great in theory, but there seem to be a few flaws in practice …

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I’m personally still very happy with my ultra-pocketable iPhone SE so I have no plans to buy the iPhone 7, but with Apple touting a brave new wireless future, I thought the launch would make an opportune moment to decide whether or not it was time for me to make the switch from a wired world.

Those who know me are often surprised to find that I wasn’t one of the first to switch to wireless headphones. I have a well-known aversion to wires, even going so far as commissioning a bespoke desk to hide them away out of sight. But while I’ve tried a few wireless headphones over the years, I’ve always come back to my wired Bowers & Wilkins P5 …

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Update: I’d been under the impression that the W1 chip in AirPods required matching tech in the iPhone 7, but it turns out this isn’t the case, and the chip can perform its pairing and power-saving magic with older devices too. That only underlines my desire to see Apple license the chip.

Of all the things that Apple announced during the iPhone 7 launch, the W1 chip actually impressed me most. I’d guessed that Apple would be including something like this, suggesting beforehand that the tech might solve three problems with Bluetooth audio.

First, fast and rock-solid pairing. First-time pairing should be quick and painless, and once headphones have been paired to a particular iPhone, they should instantly re-pair next time they are used. No more of the ‘will they or won’t they?’ question familiar to current-generation Bluetooth products.

Second, the connection too should be ultra-reliable. No random cutouts that interrupt the audio stream. Even half a second’s stuttering quickly becomes really annoying when listening to music.

Third, the power efficiency should be better than current low-energy Bluetooth, so charging headphones becomes a weekly thing for the average user, not something we have to do every few days.

Apple still hasn’t revealed much detail about the W1 chip, but it definitely addresses at least two out of the issues, and probably all three …

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Six Colors’ Jason Snell (via Daring Fireball) posed an interesting question in his preview of today’s launch event: how will Apple justify the removal of the headphone socket? Will it do so loudly or quietly, and what will it sell as the benefit?

What’s going to be interesting is how Apple explains the move. Does it play it off quickly with a shrug—“wireless is better”—or does it go into detail? Does the jack’s removal get blamed on some other great iPhone feature that required the space? Does Apple have a bigger story about wireless headphones that it uses to distract from the removal issue?

I’ve already suggested that Apple has been preparing the ground for some time now, but I think yesterday’s KGI report contained a rather large clue as to how Apple will sell the move …

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Apple Television concept by Martin Hajek

One of the longest-running rumors about Apple – that it was working on launching a fully fledged television – finally fizzled out last year, when a WSJ report said that the company had ultimately decided against the idea. Instead, Apple is aiming at a (delayed) subscription TV service, complete with original programming.

It was speculated at the time that there were two reasons for the decision. First, that Apple had been unable to come up with a compelling differentiator that would have given consumers a reason to buy an Apple television over the many rival products. Second, that there simply wasn’t enough money in the business – margins are slim, and replacement cycles are lengthy.

But a Sony Bravia issue reported this week has highlighted a third reason that an Apple television may have turned out to be a very bad idea …

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Apple Store in London’s Covent Garden

I expressed surprise on Monday that Tim Cook would write what I described as a ‘tone-deaf’ open letter on the Irish tax ruling, and it’s been fascinating to see the responses.

In particular, I think there’s a significant difference in perceptions of this issue between Americans and Europeans. This difference does, I think, explain why Cook made what seemed to me to be a strategic error.

My surprise was that he focused exclusively on arguing that Apple was obeying the law, doing nothing that other large companies don’t do – and the unfairness of the situation from Apple’s perspective. Many commentators on the piece echoed these arguments, and it’s clear that many Americans are puzzled by my description of the letter as tone-deaf, so I thought a little context would be helpful …

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Much has been written about the convenience of Apple Pay, especially on an Apple Watch. Instead of reaching into your pocket or bag for your wallet, and extracting the card you want to use, you can simply double-click the side button on the Watch and hold out your wrist.

But there’s one aspect of Apple Pay that I’ve always felt fails to get the full attention it deserves: the fact that it never hands over your card details to retailers. Even on Apple’s own microsite, the feature is buried in a paragraph whose heading is about the use of fingerprints.

Yet the list of major chains who have seen customer card details compromised is virtually a Who’s Who of retailing and the hotel trade. Acer, Carphone Warehouse, CVS Photo, Eddie Bauer, Hilton, Home Depot, K-Mart, Marriott Hotels, Michaels, Neiman Marcus, P.F. Chang’s, Staples, Starwood Hotels, SuperValu, Target, Trump Hotels and Wendy’s. That’s even before we get into the Oracle hack that may have exposed almost every US credit card … 

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: passwords are a horribly outdated and clunky approach to security, and it’s time to consign them to history. That view has been underlined by the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologist Lorrie Cranor, who this week told a security conference that official government advice to change passwords regularly can actually make things worse.

Her argument is based on something I’ve not only seen myself, but done myself – when I worked for a large company which required monthly password changes. When you force people to change their passwords regularly, they will use a predictable pattern – often nothing more than incrementing a number (something001, something002 and so on). This not only makes it easier to crack existing passwords, but also to predict what a future password will be …

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I’m not going to get into the politics of who came up with which ideas first, or who steals ideas from the other, because quite frankly, both iOS and Android have borrowed heavily from one another over the years. I could just as easily head over to 9to5Google and highlight iOS features that I’d love to see in Android, and I probably will in the future.

For now, though, I’d like to focus on iOS, specifically Control Center. It’s a feature that’s been around for going on four generations, and although it has evolved over the years, it still has a long way to go as far as I’m concerned. Here’s a look at four lessons that iOS could learn from Android when it comes to Control Center functionality.
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Regular readers will know that I still have a 17-inch MacBook Pro as my main computer. It’s almost five years old now, which is a relatively long time in Mac terms, and an absolute age for someone who usually does poorly when it comes to resisting shiny new tech.

But when Apple stopped selling the machine, I’d initially hoped that it was just a temporary measure. The company had only just introduced new Retina displays in the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros, both of which carried a hefty price-tag, and my theory then was that a 17-inch Retina screen wasn’t practical. Yield rates were too low, I supposed, meaning that the cost of a 17-inch model would have been too expensive even for Apple to contemplate.

So I hung in there …

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Since iOS 10’s first beta hit last week, testers have been seeing signs of Apple’s Search Ads in the App Store. Officially announced a week earlier, Search Ads were marketed as being a way to help customers “discover or reengage” with an application. Something I wondered immediately after the original announcement was how Apple would regulate the Search Ads in a highly competitive market. After having used iOS 10 for over a week now, I’m not any less concerned.

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The first true mobile phones back in the 1980s did exactly one thing: phone calls. It wasn’t until 1994 that carriers introduced what was then a revolutionary idea – using mobile phones to send text messages. I’m old enough to remember when only geeks did it, and it took several years before it really took off as a mass-market thing.

Fast-forward to today and, for many of us, the very least-frequent thing we do with our phones is use them to make phone calls. When I do make a voice call, I’m as likely to use a VoIP app like FaceTime or Skype as I am the actual phone app on my iPhone.

With iOS 10, Apple makes that behaviour likely for even more people. The VoIP API effectively allows apps like Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook calling and others to be integrated into the iPhone every bit as deeply as the phone app itself …

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Reactions to yesterday’s keynote have, as usual, been mixed – but there has been a distinctly disappointed note to much of it. In particular, those not following the rumors as closely as 9to5Mac readers have expressed frustration at the lack of hardware announcements. One Reddit thread along these lines was at 1550 comments and counting at the time of writing.

Who needs hardware when you get emojis?

RIP Mac Pro

What have we done to anger the apple hardware gods? Do we need to sacrifice an apple II ?

This is really really disappointing. Unbelievable that the rMBP hasn’t been updated in over a year and the prices have stayed the same.

Others weren’t happy about what they saw as the limited focus on Macs in general, one commenting that ‘they spent longer on iMessage than they did on macOS.’ But despite the lack of hardware, and of major surprises in general, my view is that yesterday’s announcements didn’t disappoint …

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Novelists and app developers have a lot in common. An author puts a lot of work into writing a novel, but when it’s finally published it’s competing with millions of other books out there. Unless you’re a big-name writer, most people will never even get to know that yours exists.

You can try to be creative with your marketing. For example, I did a Kickstarter campaign for my first novel, 11/9, and included the opening scene of The Billion Dollar Heist at the end of it to drive sales through to that. But it’s impossible to compete with the big publishing houses.

The same is true of small-time app developers. Your app may be the greatest in the world, but it steps out into a world that already has around 1.5 million iOS apps and where nobody has ever heard of yours. And with Apple now allowing successful companies to buy even more App Store visibility through search result ads, it can only get tougher for the little guy.

Which is why I think Apple could usefully learn from a new model being used for books by Amazon …

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