Opinion pieces & commentary

Two further patent applications published today and spotted by Patently Apple show that Apple continues to explore the idea of bringing a Watch-style Digital Crown to the iPad and iPhone. The original patent application was published back in July, and the two additional ones published today further refine the idea.

Apple has generally been moving away from physical controls on iDevices, the iPhone 7 replacing the mechanical Home button with a touch-sensitive one, and the iPhone 8 rumored to be embedding it into the display. We’re also expecting to see a near bezel-free design next year.

It was for this reason that the idea initially seemed unlikely …

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Apple had rather a controversial year in terms of product launches. Its two new flagship products – the iPhone 7 and the new MacBook Pro – got most attention not for what they included, but rather what they left out.

Most of the press coverage of the iPhone 7 focused on the company’s decision to omit the 3.5mm headphone socket. This was despite the fact that the move had been so long rumored that I suspect Apple deliberately leaked its plans in order to give everyone time to get used to the idea.

With the year’s MacBook Pro, the headline new feature of the Touch Bar was largely over-shadowed by the company’s decision to go all-in on the relatively new USB-C standard, omitting all other ports bar (ironically) the headphone socket …

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Consumer Reports said yesterday that the 2016 MacBook Pro was the first ever Apple laptop that the organization couldn’t recommend, due to battery-life issues.

That in itself didn’t strike me as too odd. Different users have definitely been reporting very variable results in times of battery life, and some of them have been well below half the ten hours that Apple claims. Our video rundown showed as much and our poll found that the largest group of readers was reporting five hours or less.

Given that Consumer Reports was seeing as little as 3.75 hours in its own tests, that would be good enough reason to withhold a recommendation. But it was the high-end results the organization reported that puzzle me …

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When Apple launched the iPhone 5 with a new-fangled Lightning port – instead of the 30-pin dock connector that had been a standard feature on every previous generation of iPhone, as well as on iPods since 2003 – there was a great deal of outrage.

‘What about all the docks and speaker systems we own that have 30-pin connectors?’ was the question many asked. The decision was described as arrogant and unreasonable. Apple was accused of profiteering, by forcing everyone to buy new cables, docks and speakers.

Apple responded in three ways. It pointed to the undeniable technical superiority of the new port. It explained the difficulty of making ever slimmer devices with a port designed for much thicker ones. And it assured everyone that this would be the last change for a long time – that the Lightning port would be around for many years to come …

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When Apple unveiled its latest MacBook Pro models, making particular reference to their ability to drive multiple 4K and 5K monitors, some wondered whether the company was readying itself to exit the desktop market – as it has already done for displays.

Even Apple’s own employees appeared to share this concern, with one asking on the company’s internal Apple Web system ‘Are Mac desktops strategic for us?’.

Tim Cook was quick to offer reassurance, stating that the desktop market was ‘very strategic’ for Apple, and that the company has ‘great desktops in our roadmap.’ There were, though, a couple of problems with this assurance …

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Apple has finally launched its legal challenge to an EU ruling that it must pay an additional €13B ($14B) in tax after a special tax deal offered by the Irish government was found to be illegal. The Irish government had already submitted its own appeal against the ruling, stating today that ‘Ireland did not give favourably tax treatment to Apple- the full amount was paid in this case and no state aid was provided.’

On the face it, the EU case is a strong one. The deal with the Irish government – detailed in a Bloomberg analysis – meant that the vast majority of Apple’s taxes were assigned to a ‘head office’ that wasn’t tax resident anywhere in the world, and which therefore paid no taxes at all. This is how, according to the EU case, Apple effectively paid as little as 0.005% tax on billions of dollars of European sales …

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When Apple exited the display business and announced that it was partnering with LG for two new 4K and 5K UltraFine displays aimed specifically at owners of the new MacBook Pro machines, it promised that the 5K model would be available in December. LG went further and said ‘early December.’

Apple also showed introductory pricing valid only this month, reverting to full price in January.

As of today – officially mid-December – you can order the 4K model direct from Apple for the introductory price of $524, albeit with a lead-time of 5-6 weeks. But the ‘Add to Bag’ button on the 5K model remains greyed-out, its status shown as ‘Currently unavailable’ …

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Following widespread complaints that the remaining battery life estimate was wildly inaccurate on the new MacBook Pro models, Apple acted swiftly to resolve the issue. Unfortunately, that action was not to fix the estimate, but rather to remove it altogether. As John Gruber put it, ‘this is like being late for work and fixing it by breaking your watch.’

I do appreciate the challenge Apple faces with providing accurate battery-life estimates with the 2016 MacBook Pro. I’ve heard from multiple sources that the Skylake CPUs used in the new machines are extremely responsive in the way they ramp Turbo Boost up and down to provide the optimum balance of power and energy-efficiency for each given task.

That means that the amount of battery power being consumed can vary dramatically within the course of just a few seconds. Given that macOS seemingly estimates battery life on a second-by-second basis, the combination of the two things is clearly going to result in the kind of wild fluctuations and inaccurate estimates we’ve seen.

But it’s surely not beyond the wit of Apple’s software engineers to change the way the estimate is calculated … ?

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I noted a few weeks ago that, given the ultra-low repairability of the new MacBook Pro, I was buying AppleCare for the first time. Pretty much anything going wrong with the machine – RAM, SSD, Touch Bar, even the power switch – is likely to require a whole new motherboard. And given that the screen is bonded into the lid of the case, we can also forget about repairing that.

So I bit the bullet and handed over the cash for an AppleCare policy. What we need when buying AppleCare is the 15-character registration code. What we actually get is a cardboard box containing not just one but two separate booklets totalling 92 pages …

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It was reported yesterday that Apple is disbanding the division of the company responsible for its wireless networking products: the hard drive-equipped Time Capsule and both AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express routers. The report was given additional credence by recent discounts and the fact that the products haven’t been updated in more than three years.

On one level, the decision seems like a no-brainer for Apple. The company is in the premium product basis. Back in the days when Wi-Fi was a new thing, it made sense for Apple to boost adoption rates by offering its own products; now it’s ubiquitous, there’s no reason for the company to be in what is today a very mundane product category.

But if the news is confirmed, it will sadden me a little – and worry me slightly as well …

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I don’t generally bother with AppleCare. My usual view is that, like any other extended warranty, it offers poor value for money. You’re paying a lot of money upfront for coverage you’ll likely never need.

Most Mac faults are going to make themselves known well inside the first year of standard Apple warranty coverage. The likelihood of a major fault occurring in the interval between the standard warranty expiring and AppleCare doing the same is very low. (There’s an additional factor at play in the EU, which I’ll get to later as it won’t be relevant to U.S. readers.)

But I am opting for it this time. Because the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is not only non-upgradable, but also pretty much non-repairable …

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[First of all, I would like to say that this is but my very own take, which is not necessarily shared by my colleagues here at 9to5Mac and therefore not an editorial, staff-wise opinion piece. It represents my view and my view only, so try to keep that in mind.]

Up until not too long ago, I used to ask myself a simple question: if I were to pick one company — and one company alone — to rely on for all of my “tech needs”, which one would I choose? The answer would come rather swiftly: Apple.

As a critic (by nature more than profession) I have always seen the vast majority of products skeptically, but that didn’t take from the fact that the Cupertino giant made what I considered to be the best smartphone, the best tablet, the best computers and even two of the most valid operating systems around, accounting for a sweet, unified and well-connected package that would make me feel like I didn’t have to look outside of it. It was Apple’s dream of ecosystem lock-in, essentially.

However, as my view of this universe has got more and more panoramic — especially in the last year of collaboration with the sister site 9to5Google, which has helped me a lot to gain even more direct experience with Apple’s competition — I started to have a feeling that this bubble was somewhat bursting.

And this feeling is something I simply haven’t been able to shake, and one that has brought me, like apparently many others, to think that the well-oiled profit machine Apple Inc. may have lost some of its touch, for what concerns the present and, more importantly, the future…

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Concept image: macitynet.it

One of the comments people have been making about the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro is that it will be irrelevant to those professionals who mostly use their Mac at their desk with an external monitor and keyboard. Unless Apple can offer an external keyboard with a Touch Bar, the feature may not see much use.

So does Apple have a plan to offer an external keyboard with a Touch Bar? To offer an Even More Magic Keyboard … ?

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Update: Apple subsequently fixed the issue. I’m unsure exactly which update did so, but everything is fine again in macOS 10.12.4. One thing to note if you have more than one Mac: when you switch on iCloud drive, all of the files and folders that were on your desktop will be moved to a Desktop folder inside iCloud Drive – see Apple’s support document on this. Documents from your other Mac(s) will be found inside a folder with the same name as the Mac.

I wrote an opinion piece last month entitled macOS Sierra’s new storage-management tools are a bit of a mess. 

Effectively you are switching from a belt-and-braces system, where you have three copies – one local, a second in your local Time Machine backup, a third on iCloud – to just a single copy. That’s way too risky for my tastes, especially given the somewhat flakey reliability record of Apple’s cloud services.

But Mac users may also be running that same risk without even realizing it. Because that first option – to ‘Optimize Mac Storage’ for files stored on iCloud – is on by default in my experience. This means that, for any file on iCloud, your Mac could be deleting files from your Mac without your knowledge or permission. That should never be the case.

I was wrong. Sierra’s storage-management aren’t a ‘bit of a mess’ at all: having just seen what they did to my MacBook Air, seemingly prompted by the update to 10.12.1, they are a complete and utter disaster … 

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Quite a few people have been commenting on Apple’s use of ‘hello again’ as the tagline for tomorrow’s MacBook event. ‘Hello’ featured twice in the launch of the original Macintosh back in 1984: it was displayed on the screen in ‘handwriting’ to show off the graphics capabilities of the machine, and of course the Macintosh famously introduced itself by speaking the words ‘Hello, I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.’

It was 14 years later before Apple again referenced the greeting, when the first iMac – the colorful cube variety – displayed ‘hello (again)’ on the screen. That was the machine credited with turning around Apple’s fortunes just a year after the company had to be bailed-out by Microsoft. The ‘industry-altering success of the candy-colored iMacs’ as Forbes put it.

So it’s no surprise that Apple’s use of ‘hello again’ as the tagline for tomorrow’s event is being taken as evidence that the company thinks it’s going to be showing us something pretty special …

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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 …

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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