Opinion pieces & commentary

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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Mac Podcasts app concept 

Yesterday in my WWDC wish list I included a request for pulling Apple’s podcast player out of iTunes and promoting it to a dedicated app on the Mac just like it is on iOS. iTunes in its current form can be a mess as a music player, but at least that tries to be its primary function; being a good podcast player is hardly the focus of iTunes. Aside from removing part of the bloat from iTunes, promoting podcast playback on the Mac to its own app would solve several existing problems.

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In an opinion piece a couple of weeks ago, I described the way I hope the rumored touch-panel will be used: dynamic content available to app developers to create one-touch shortcuts. Effectively you’d get similar benefits to a physical keyboard skin but for every app. Check out that piece first if you haven’t already read it so I don’t need to repeat the same points here.

Of course, there are potential downsides to that too. At present, I’m used to being able to adjust the volume or play/pause music, for example, just by pressing a key. My fingers know where those keys are, so it’s very easy to do. If the standard functions were overwritten by apps, it would become a fiddlier process to do things we currently take for granted.

So here are a few thoughts about how Apple might give us the best of both worlds – and the somewhat provocative view that the touch-panel might still be a good thing even if it turns out to be nothing more than a gimmick …

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It’s been a rough couple of days for Apple’s services. Apple Music took a lengthy hit on Wednesday with subscribers being signed out, then a widespread outage hit multiple services including iCloud on Thursday for several hours. All this during a quarter when Apple is selling itself to investors as a services company, not just the iPhone company, but these outages are way too common.

And it’s not just services. Apple had to re-release iOS 9.3.2 for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, a minor bug fix update that bricked the company’s latest tablet for a lot of customers. Mistakes happen but it’s Apple’s response after everything is resolved that bothers me…

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Yesterday, well-respected venture capitalist Mary Meeker released her annual Internet Trends Report. Inside the over 200 slide PowerPoint were some interesting numbers relating to the continuing battle between iOS and Android. As we reported last night, Meeker’s report showed iOS continue to decline in marketshare, while Android continues to gain. In many ways, the current split between Android and iOS in terms of market share and unit shipments is very similar to the split between Mac and PC shipments and marketshare. And it’s been a long time coming for Apple.

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Earlier today Apple announced the start of their annual Back to School promotion for 2016. This year eligible purchases of a Mac, iPad, or iPhone will come bundled with a pair of wireless Beats headphones. This is reminiscent of last year’s Back to School promotion, save for the fact that during this year’s promotion for the wireless headphone is the default and doesn’t require an extra $100 expense. The small, but obvious connectivity choice signals a new direction in which Apple wants its customer to think.

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For all of its shortcomings, the Apple Watch has redeemed itself for me with its fitness and health tracking features. I wear it primarily because it’s a watch but I like (the idea of) having Siri always there plus access to important alerts instantly. The sports watch part can be ignored if you’re not interested, but being one device means its still there if you decide to explore activity tracking later.

That’s been my experience. I generally ignored activity tracking for the first year, but decided at the end of March to use the start of April as a reason to pay attention. The Activity app uses week- and month-long streaks to mark achievements, so the start of a new month (like today) can be motivating.

My real goal was to lose weight using Apple Watch as a motivator. Two months in, I’ve been very happy with the results so far and have to give Apple Watch plenty of credit for pushing me forward. My routine also involves iPhone apps, smarter food choices, and some basic equipment, but closing the Activity rings is the most compelling part.

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When Siri originally launched on the iPhone a little over four years ago, we postulated that it would be a world-changing event. A personal assistant in our pockets that could handle real-world requests felt like the future. When it launched onto the Apple Watch, it was described as potentially being the quickest and most fun way to interact with the wearable. Then when it came to  the Apple TV, it became the fastest way to disseminate the content you want to watch across multiple apps.

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Apple’s conservative approach to the iOS status bar on iPhone and iPad is easily one of the clear design victories over Android’s unruly approach. Android, by design, will show separate icons for each Twitter mention, Instagram comment, Facebook alert, and any other alert, which I personally find to be overwhelming and just plain ugly. iOS doesn’t allow app icons to clutter the status bar. Instead, it uses temporary banners, lock screen messages, app icon badges, and the Notification Center curtain to show you what you’ve missed. But I have noticed a few examples lately where the iOS status bar has gotten sloppy and needs some real attention before iOS 10.

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iPhone concept image by Yasser Farahi

That Nikkei report claiming that Apple is moving to a three-year cycle on major iPhone refreshes would be huge news if true.

Apple currently has a very well-established ‘tick-tock’ cycle where we see a new form-factor every two years, and new features within the same casing on alternate years. That’s a very efficient approach: Apple generates new demand each year without having the pressure to design a whole new model each time.

Some will upgrade every single year; others will be more influenced by design, and buy in ‘tick’ years; others will be more concerned about features, and will buy in ‘tock’ years. The result is that every year, you have a bunch of customers eager to buy.

A switch to a three-year cycle would seem a dangerous one – so could it really be true, or is something else going on … ?

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