By John Gruber
Eugene Kim, writing for Business Insider:
During the keynote speech at Dreamforce Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was put in a situation where he had to use Apple’s iPhone to do a demo — a sight that would’ve been unimaginable just a few years back.
“I’m going to first start on this iPhone, and it’s not my phone, but it is an iPhone,” said Nadella, smiling, as he walked to the podium to show Microsoft’s email app Outlook on mobile.
“It’s a pretty unique iPhone. In fact, I’d like to call it the ‘iPhone Pro’ because it’s got all of the Microsoft software and applications on it,” he quipped, apparently referencing Apple’s introduction of the iPad Pro last week.
Steve Ballmer is rolling over in his iPhone coffin.
Manton Reece:
Apple has 4 major platforms now: iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and the Mac. It’s a dangerous precedent for 2 out of those 4 to not have access to the open web. Web services are only part of the story; HTML and the hyperlink are also both fundamental components of web access. A platform is too shut off from the rest of the world without them.
Not every platform needs the web. A watch certainly does not. The screen interface for a car doesn’t either. (That could be the third straight new platform Apple ships without a web browser.) TV seems in between. I think it’s ridiculous to think about a wrist-worn web browser. It’s not ridiculous to think about a TV web browser — but I don’t think the user experience would be good. It’s time to move on. “Every device needs the web” sounds like an updated version of “every device needs a command-line terminal”.
It could be that Apple plans to add WebKit to Apple TV in the future, but that they’re withholding it now simply to make it impossible for developers to create Apple TV apps that are merely thin web view wrappers — in the same way the original Macintosh, which shipped without any sort of command line, forced developers to write true native Mac apps.
Or it could be that Apple has decided never to open WebKit to developers on Apple TV. I’ve never seen a TV-connected device with a good interface for web browsing. Just leave it off, I say.
But either way, it won’t affect Apple TV’s success, and everything will be OK.
Benedict Evans on Apple’s new iPhone Upgrade Program:
So what happens to the old phones? When you take that upgrade, you have to hand in your old one. They go into the secondary market, which is rather the dark matter of the industry - we know it must be large and we can get some sense of that from survey data, but we don’t have a solid number. One illuminating data point is the fact that for the last several years the number of iPhones that seem to be in China (if you look at data from companies like Baidu) has been rather larger than the number of iPhones that Apple’s financial reporting implies could have been sold there. Second-hand closes some of the gap.
The reason the whole thing makes financial sense is that you have to give them back your old phone when you upgrade to the new one, and those old phones are worth a few hundred bucks.
So if Google made a similar “Move to Android” app, would Apple allow it in the App Store? They’d sure look like hypocrites if they didn’t — but App Store Guideline 3.1 states:
Apps or metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected.
Rene Ritchie:
After the radical redesign of iOS 7, which gave us a cleaner, more flexible experience, and the functional revolution of iOS 8, which extended and continued that experience between apps and devices, iOS 9 takes a moment to solidify and round-out everything that’s come before, and start us towards everything that’s coming next.
This includes making Siri and Search broader and more proactive, expanding Apple Pay, rebuilding Notes, adding transit to Maps, launching a News app, enhancing the QuickType keyboard and bringing multi-app multitasking to the iPad, amping up performance, extending battery life, tightening up security and privacy, and making the update process much more efficient.
Absent the radical and the revolutionary, then, iOS 9 has to deliver on the promise not of more but of better. After the giant leaps, it has to stick the landing.
Book-length and comprehensive, in the spirit of Siracusa’s Mac OS X reviews.
Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic on Tim Cook’s appearance on Colbert last night:
Cook’s interview was, say what else you will about it, not fluff. It was funny, at points, but it was, more than anything else, serious. It had a distinct whiff of humanism in it — one that has been showing up in other Colbert interviews, as well. Which might indicate, just a little bit, what The Late Show is going to become as it settles into itself. Because when you hear a guest uttering the phrase “human rights” — multiple times! — on a late-night comedy show, that says as much about the show as it does about the guest.
Nilay Patel on Twitter:
Gotta say that @gruber sounds way too smug about the pain coming to small publishers like The Awl because of Apple. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/09/16/johnston-block-party
Two points:
The coming reckoning for publishers is not “because of Apple”. It’s because of the choices the publishers themselves made, years ago, to allow themselves to become dependent on user-hostile ad networks that slow down the web, waste precious device battery life, and invade our privacy. Apple has simply enabled us, the users who are fed up with this crap, to do something about it. If aggressive content blocking were enabled out of the box, by default, I could see saying the result is “because of Apple”. But it’s not. What’s about to happen is thus because of us, the users.
Perhaps I am being smug. But I see the fact that Daring Fireball’s revenue streams should remain unaffected by Safari content-blocking as affirmation that my choices over the last decade have been correct: that I should put my readers’ interests first, and only publish the sort of ads and sponsorships that I myself would want to be served, even if that means leaving (significant) amounts of money on the table along the way. But I take no joy in the fact that a terrific publication like The Awl might be facing hard times. They’re smart; they will adapt.
Hide & Seek is one of my aforementioned two favorite Safari content blockers:
With both Google and Microsoft, if you’re logged into one service, you’re logged into all of them. For example, if you use Gmail on the browser, you become automatically logged in when you use Google search. This means that Google can (and does) associate your search query with your Google account. To counter this, you can use Hide & Seek to hide your identity in Google search, while still staying logged into Gmail.
Before using Hide & Seek, you’ll have to decide which Google and Bing services you’d like to use logged out. Then, configure Hide & Seek to hide your identity in those services. After that, you can search as usual and your searches will be performed as a logged out user. You can simultaneously use other Google or Microsoft services (like Gmail or Outlook) in other tabs as a logged in user.
Note that Hide & Seek has nothing to do with “blocking ads”. It is simply about maintaining your privacy and anonymity while using Google and Bing for web search. In my testing, it works like a charm.
Dave Mark is compiling a list.
Last night, writing about the expected release of iOS 9 today, I wrote: “iOS 9 probably ships tomorrow.” A few people questioned my use of probably, given that Apple had announced today as the ship date at last week’s event. Probably did read a little odd — in hindsight I would have written “is scheduled to ship tomorrow”.
But the thing is, I believe in Murphy’s Law, and in not counting unhatched chickens. And, lo, WatchOS 2.0, which was also scheduled to ship today, has been delayed. Here is the statement I received from an Apple spokesperson:
“We have discovered a bug in development of watchOS 2 that is taking a bit longer to fix than we expected. We will not release watchOS 2 today but will shortly.”
If you want to skip ahead, Cook’s segment starts around the 27:00 mark. He and Colbert were both great. Unless I’m forgetting something, Steve Jobs never appeared on a live audience talk show.
Update: On the Mac, CBS’s video player requires Flash Player — it doesn’t even work with the Develop menu trick of changing your user agent to that of an iOS device. That’s absurd in 2015. It works fine on iOS, but if you’re stuck on a Mac, here’s a clip they released on YouTube where Cook talks about why he came out as gay.
CBS: get your shit together.
Casey Johnston has a interesting piece for The Awl on the reckoning that’s coming when ad-blocking goes mainstream with iOS 9:
The Awl’s publisher Michael Macher told me that “the percentage of the network’s revenue that is blockable by adblocking technology hovers around seventy-five to eighty-five percent.”
They better move fast. iOS 9 probably ships tomorrow.
Serenity Caldwell, writing at iMore:
Based on a screenshot from Apple’s developer guidelines, there are some folks up in arms about the new Apple TV’s 200 MB limit for app bundles (the app you download from the Apple TV’s App Store).
200 MB isn’t a whole lot of storage for game levels, offline content services, or anything really of the sort. The good news is, 200 MB is just the size limit for your initial App Store download. Once you open the app, you can download up to 2 GB more per app, with up to 20 GB of other resources available in the cloud. Apple lets developers do this by using On-Demand Resources, and here’s how it works.
Great explanation.
Daniel Jalkut:
As Pasco acknowledges, we don’t know Apple’s real motivation for omitting web views from Apple TV. There may be technical challenges or performance shortcomings that contributed to the decision. But let’s assume for the sake of reasoning that it is purely political, that they want to discourage “web wrappers” and to promote a more native look and feel in TV apps. I propose that Apple could strike a compromise that would serve those ambitions while also supporting the tasteful handling of web content in apps. How? By forbidding network access to web content. Apps themselves could still access the network, but not from within their web views.
I don’t think that’s going to happen. Either WebKit isn’t there in tvOS 1.0 because (a) Apple doesn’t think it belongs on this platform, or (b) it just isn’t ready yet.
I think the answer is (a), and we’ll never see web content rendered on this platform. If the answer is (b), I think we’ll see a “full” WebKit eventually. I don’t think we’ll ever see Safari for Apple TV, but I could imagine WebKit for the “views and controls that are really just HTML/CSS” type stuff.
Daniel Pasco:
Webkit is the framework that Apple uses to allow developers to include webviews in their apps. UIWebview, a UIKit class, provides a simple way to do so. Both of these are missing from tvOS.
Even though the classes exist to fetch a page from a remote site, nothing else is really there — the content has to be parsed, the DOM has to be built, the actual HTML has to be rendered and styled, and any embedded Javascript has to be run. There’s no mechanism for doing any of these things or presenting the Web page to the users. […]
No matter what the motivation, there’s going to be a lot of work for people to do, particularly for companies that lean heavily on embedded Web content for their apps. Obviously this is going to be great for users, in terms of a consistent experience.
But the industry is going to be very, very busy for a while making the changes needed to support this new platform.
Former Apple designer Linda Dong:
Quite plainly, the Cintiq sucks in comparison. And I’ve been using them for years for industrial design sketching, UI, and art. Let’s compare the experience.
Nice piece by John Paczkowski for Buzzfeed:
Tim Cook is twisted sideways in the deep passenger-side backseat of a black Cadillac Escalade, rolling through Manhattan from the Flatiron district up to the company’s flagship Fifth Avenue Apple Store — where a great glass cube sits atop Apple’s subterranean retail center. Nobody at the store knows he’s coming. Not the manager. Not security. There’s no timetable for him to appear. And so for the 20 minutes or so it takes the car to wind through the late afternoon Manhattan traffic, I have him largely to myself.
Cook likes the secrecy. He does these store drop-ins periodically and has found that surprise visits are far better for everyone involved, himself included. The CEO of Apple visiting one of Apple’s many retail stores is de facto a big deal, particularly for store employees who’d likely agonize over preparations if they knew he was coming. So Cook keeps it quiet. “I almost always go in unannounced,” he says. “It’s rare that I tell anyone that I’m going. But I do try to go to stores every time I’m traveling to a new city. It’s important.”
Interesting, but not surprising, that Cook just pops in unannounced.
Cook will appear on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert tonight.
Sam Mattera, writing for The Motley Fool:
The video game specialty retailer will no longer carry console bundles that offer digital copies of games. Buyers may still get their games, but only in the form of physical discs.
Since the Xbox One and PlayStation debuted nearly two years ago, Microsoft and Sony have periodically offered free games to entice console buyers. Most of these games have come in the form of digital download codes rather than discs. GameStop has sold many of these bundles, but will no longer do so going forward.
The desperation of a business based on obsolete technology. GameStop is where Blockbuster and mass-market record stores were a decade ago.
Saw this in action at Panic HQ over the weekend, while in Portland for XOXO (which was amazing, once again). Just beautiful.
Gee, I wonder if they’ll do a version for Apple TV.
Peter-Paul Koch, back on July 28 (this one has been sitting in my to-link-to queue for a while):
I don’t think this is a particularly good place to push the web forward to. Native apps will always be much better at native than a browser. Instead, we should focus on the web’s strengths: simplicity, URLs and reach.
The innovation machine is running at full speed in the wrong direction. We need a break. We need an opportunity to learn to the features we already have responsibly — without tools! Also, we need the time for a fundamental conversation about where we want to push the web forward to. A year-long moratorium on new features would buy us that time.
I agree with Koch’s argument here, strongly, but I don’t think the solution is a one-year moratorium on new browser features. The solution is for the entire browser/web development community to get it through their heads that the web will never out-native actual native apps. The reason the web “won” in the late ’90s — where by “won” I mean became the dominant platform for software development — wasn’t because web apps were native-like. Quite the opposite: the web became dominant despite the fact that the apps were rather crude from a UI perspective.
“Simplicity, URLs, and reach” — those are exactly the things the web community should focus on. Native apps can’t out-web the web, and web apps should embrace that.
As a side note, I think this is more or less what is happening, whether the web community likes it or not, because this largely seems to describe Safari/WebKit’s approach to moving forward — and Safari, because of iOS in particular — effectively gives Apple veto power over new web technologies. Apple can’t stop Google from adding new features to Chrome/Blink, but Apple can keep any such features from being something web developers can rely upon as being widely available. That implicit veto power is what drove this summer’s “Safari is the New IE” drama.
Marco Arment:
It’s hard to find useful microphone recommendations for podcasters: most people have only tried one or two, except pro audio engineers, who have very different needs and record in very different environments. And almost no reviews include audio samples to compare.
So I set out to change that. Some commonly recommended mics were disappointing, some were right on, and I’ve found some real gems that were previously unknown in my podcasting circles.
I bought his top-rated microphone, the Shure Beta 87A, a few weeks ago, and I’ve been very happy with the results.
Tareq Ismail:
The difference in screen size from the iPhone 3GS, the standard iPhone available at the time, to the original iPad is a factor of 2.7 times — which turns out to be the exact same factor between the iPhone 6/6s and the iPad Pro.
Developer Hamza Sood found a clever way to ascertain the RAM amounts from the Xcode 7 device simulator. In a separate tweet, he explains:
The image asset is chosen based on the memoryClass key in the simdevicetype’s capabilities.plist. 0 = < 1GB, 1 = 1GB, 2 = 2GB, 3 = 4GB.
Sad news from Switzerland:
The internationally renowned Bernese designer who created the famous Univers typeface passed away on September 12 in Bern at the age of 87.
He was one of the few typographers whose worked with hot metal, photographic and digital typesetting during his long career. Besides his well-known Univers family of sans serif typefaces, Frutiger designed over 50 other fonts like Roissy, Avenir, Centennial, Egyptienne, Glyphia, Seifa and Versailles. He was also the man behind OCR-B, the standard alphabet for optical character recognition.
What a remarkable career.
Ben Thompson, after Apple unveiled the iPad Pro last week:
Over the last several years both Microsoft and Adobe have altered their business models away from packaged software towards subscription pricing; while their users may have grumbled, they also had no choice given their dependence on the two software giants’ products. And, it’s that new model that justifies the expense of developing iPad apps and explains why it is Apple’s old nemeses who are doing by far the most interesting work on the iPad. Unfortunately, this isn’t a model that is readily replicable for the sort of development shops that Apple needs to invest significant time and resources in creating must-have iPad apps: what customer is going to sign up for a recurring payment for an app that doesn’t even have a service component and that the customer hasn’t even tried?
Sketch is a well-done, very popular Mac tool for designers. It’s gained particular traction among UI designers.
Here’s one of Sketch’s developers, replying to a thread on Designer News from users hoping to see a version of Sketch for the iPad Pro:
We don’t have plans for an iPad pro version at the moment. Yes, it has a beautiful screen, but there’s more to consider, such as how to adapt the UI for touch without compromising the experience.
But the biggest problem is the platform. Apps on iOS sell for unsustainably low prices due to the lack of trials. We cannot port Sketch to the iPad if we have no reasonable expectation of earning back on our investment.
This, I think, is the single biggest problem holding back the iPad. Apple sees the App Store as a success because there are so many apps, and so many downloads. But the Mac has an established ecosystem that allows for sustainable pricing — including upgrade pricing — for professional tools. (Sketch for Mac costs $100.)
There are exceptions: pro software that sells for sustainable prices in the App Store. But they are exceptions, not the norms. The iPad is five years old and there just isn’t as much “pro” software for it as there should be. And I think it’s hurting the platform. In theory, developers like Bohemian Coding (the makers of Sketch) should be all over the iPad Pro. In reality, they’re staying away simply because they don’t think they’ll make enough money to justify the costs of development.
Apple statement:
Customer response to iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus has been extremely positive and preorders this weekend were very strong around the world. We are on pace to beat last year’s 10 million unit first-weekend record when the new iPhones go on sale Sept. 25.
As many customers noticed, the online demand for iPhone 6S Plus has been exceptionally strong and exceeded our own forecasts for the preorder period. We are working to catch up as quickly as we can, and we will have iPhone 6S Plus as well as iPhone 6S units available at Apple retail stores when they open next Friday.
So much for speculation that last year was peak iPhone.
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Speaking of Apple’s new Smart Keyboard, this comic from three years ago proved remarkably prescient, timing-wise at least.
Speaking of Jason Snell, here’s his take on the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard:
Would I want to write a novel on the Smart Keyboard or the iPad Pro’s touchscreen keyboard? No, I suppose I wouldn’t. But I’m pretty sure that I could absolutely do so with the Smart Keyboard–and I’d certainly benefit from having a physical keyboard with me all the time, not just when I had the time and inclination to tote along an external Bluetooth keyboard.
His first impressions match mine.
Great take from Jason Snell on yesterday. Here’s a bit from his notes on Apple TV:
Most exciting is unshackling developers who, even when granted access to the old Apple TV, were stuck fitting services into a very simple Apple TV interface template. Now that the Apple TV runs apps, that consistency is out the window. A few years ago I was blown away by the version of MLB At Bat for the PS3, but on Apple TV its interface was vanilla. On stage today, we saw the same kind of creativity in MLB at Bat for Apple TV that we saw on MLB at Bat for consoles ages ago. Other media companies — Netflix, Hulu, maybe even Amazon Instant Video — can create their own experiences in their own apps. I think it’s great news.
I agree with Apple that the future of TV is apps. But I think some people could misunderstand that. It’s not about the fact that there will be lots of apps (but there will be lots of apps). It’s about the fact that there are apps at all.
On the current Apple TV, some people call the current root-level offerings “apps”. But they’re not really apps. You could just as easily call them “channels”. They’re just different ways to get video streaming onto your screen.
Go back and look at the MLB At Bat demo from yesterday’s keynote. That’s an app.
I know yesterday’s keynote was jam-packed, but this news would’ve made for a great slide.
This was it: one big event for all of Apple’s late 2015 product announcements. In the previous three years, Apple held separate events in September (iPhone) and October (iPad/Mac). They’ve done this because they typically have more to announce than would fit comfortably in one event. As I wrote yesterday, I thought they’d have two events again this year, because it looked like they once again had more stuff ready to announce than would fit, comfortably, in one event.
To do just one event, something had to give. One casualty was the Mac. Other than a few offhand references to things that work with features in Mac OS X, the Mac got no stagetime whatsover. El Capitan’s only public demo will have been at WWDC back in June. Whatever new Macs get released this year (retina 21-inch iMac, updated MacBook Pros?) will be announced via press releases.
The second casualty was my bladder. Today’s event ran 2h:20m, including the musical performance by One Republic. That’s long. Not ridiculously long. Not too long, even. But long. It couldn’t have gone any longer — and from what I’ve gathered from a few little birdies, Apple had to cut a lot during rehearsals to get it down to the length it ran.
My guess is that one event, in early September, is going to be the new normal. I gather that Apple has decided that putting all of its wood behind one fall event arrow, even if it means that they have to cut worthy products from getting any stage time, is better than spreading themselves too thin with two events in short succession.
Everything visible inside the Bill Graham Center was installed by Apple. Most of the structure was built just for the event. They even bought all the seating — you should probably contact Apple if you’re looking to buy theater seating. Effectively, Apple designed and built their own custom theater just for this event. It looked great. Especially the screen — that was the biggest and best screen I can recall at an Apple event. The acoustics and sound quality were excellent as well.
There were around 1,500 people in the audience — but at least 1,000 were Apple employees. That’s new — there have never been that many Apple employees at one of these events before, with the possible exception of last year’s event at the Flint Center. At a smaller venue like Yerba Buena or Apple’s tiny on-campus Town Hall, there just isn’t enough room. At WWDC (and in years past, Macworld Expo) Moscone is filled with paid ticket holders. Having that many employees in the room changes the tenor of the audience considerably — the cheering and applause were raucous.
In terms of stagecraft, this event was really well-structured and edited. That’s in stark contrast to June’s WWDC keynote, which was, by Apple’s standards, a bit of a rambling mess. In hindsight, I think this year’s WWDC keynote was the worst Apple event in years, and perhaps the worst in the modern (post-NeXT reunification) Apple era. It was too long, had no flow between acts/segments, and the Apple Music segment was downright awkward and under-rehearsed.
One of the reasons I didn’t expect to see iPad Pro announced at this event is that I thought adding a fourth act (in addition to iPhone, Watch, and TV) would make the show feel messy, like that WWDC keynote. Apple did add a fourth act, but there was a tight flow and it felt like there was a logical order to the segments. It felt like a show that had four acts, not just four announcements stitched together.
I have never been in the “Apple is doomed without Steve Jobs” camp, but I did long wonder whether Apple would suffer gravely without Jobs when it came to these keynotes. Not that Jobs, the presenter, was irreplaceable — even though, without question, he was the best stage presence, a genuine rock star. Apple has plenty of good presenters. It was Jobs the director, writer, and editor who I worried Apple would miss. The keynote auteur. Steve Jobs could look at a list of products and announcements and he knew how to structure an event around them. During rehearsals, Jobs had final cut over everything: what was announced, in what order, at what pace — every word, every slide. He had a knack for it.
It’s often painfully obvious that the public presentations of big companies are dictated by internal politics more than showmanship. Jobs had the unquestioned stature to settle any such arguments, and his innate showmanship allowed him to keep the focus relentlessly on putting together a good cohesive show. I think we saw a drift away from that cohesiveness back at WWDC this year.
Today’s event was a welcome course correction — and given the breadth of the announcements, it was all the more impressive.
The expanded color options for Apple’s sport bands was predictable, but it’s smart. With the addition of two new anodized colors for the Sport watches (gold and a feminine-but-not-girly rose gold), the complete product matrix for all the various watch straps, watch sizes, and watch finishes is remarkably complex. I think it’s a good example, though, of a product matrix that is complex but not complicated. People know what they like when they see it.
The Apple Watch Hermès is interesting. I speculated back in May that luxury brands like Tiffany and Louis Vuitton might make watch bands for Apple Watch. This is even better — a full-on partnership between Apple and a luxury fashion brand, including a custom branded watch face. (How will that work? A custom Hermès build of WatchOS — sort of like the individual per-carrier builds of iOS for iPhones? Or will WatchOS only offer the Hermès watch face on watches within a specific serial number / device ID range?) The Hermès straps are gorgeous.
I still think Tiffany is a good bet for a similar partnership. They have a signature color that would look great on a woman’s watch strap. Gucci would be a great fit, too. And of course Burberry, for obvious reasons. In theory, Louis Vuitton would work, but in practice it might prove politically unfeasible, because Louis Vuitton is the “LV” in LVMH, the French luxury mega-conglomerate1 that owns luxury watch brands like TAG Heuer, Hublot, Zenith, and others.
Apple called the A9X “desktop class”, and that’s not hyperbole. They said it outperforms 80 percent of laptops sold in the last 12 months — and 90 percent of them in graphics. But, let’s face it, the vast majority of “laptops” are piece of crap PCs. What’s impressive is that the iPad Pro will compare favorably to very recent MacBooks. I think it’ll benchmark comparably to, say, a 2013 MacBook Air. I wouldn’t be surprised if the iPad Pro outperforms the Intel-based Surface Pro 3 from Microsoft. iPad Pro might be the inflection point where Apple’s ARM chips surpass Intel’s in terms of raw speed for this class of hardware — and if it doesn’t, next year’s A10X will.
As with other iPads and iPhones, Apple won’t talk about RAM, even though developers will be able to find out as soon as they get their hands on them. If we were to wager on the amount of RAM in iPad Pro, my bet would be 4 GB. And I would wager very heavily.
Apple TV is hot. I only got a brief period to play with it, but it seems fast, responsive, beautiful, and intuitive. It feels alive. If I worked at Apple I’d want to be on that team. On first impression, it is everything I wanted to see. It sounds like a small talented team got to build the Apple TV they wanted to see and use themselves. There is a clarity and vision to the entirety of its design. I think it exemplifies the best of Apple.
The new Apple TV seems great for both video consumption and casual gaming. The MLB At Bat demo during the event was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Not just because I’m a baseball fan, but because it presented a revolutionary way to watch live events, period. I think Apple TV might be the most disruptive product from Apple since the iPhone. Not the most lucrative, necessarily, but the most disruptive — in the sense of defining how all TVs will work in a few years.
“3D Touch” is the new “Force Touch” (Craig Federighi slipped at one point, saying “force” before correcting himself.) I’ve seen concerns that this overcomplicates the iPhone’s UI design, but I would argue the opposite. It’s the multi-touch equivalent of keyboard shortcuts on the desktop: shortcuts for tasks that can all be accomplished without it. To use the old parlance, 3D Touch is for power users.
The taptic feedback feels great. Apple calls the two levels “peek” and “pop”. They definitely feel different. Peek is like the half-press on a camera shutter to auto-focus, and pop is the full-press to take a picture. Pop feels stronger. And, for 3D touch UI elements that only have one level, you feel the pop right away, giving you haptic feedback that you need not try pressing harder, because you’re already all the way in. The taptic engine also serves as the vibrator for notifications, and I suspect that’s going to be a big improvement over the rinky-dink vibrator in every iPhone since the iPhone 4.
One small camera bummer: just like last year, optical image stabilization is only available on the Plus. And on the 6S Plus, it’s even better: OIS now works for video in addition to stills — Apple had a demo video shot while hiking on a trail and it looked really smooth.
I very much liked the iPhone 6S commercial: “The only thing that’s changed is everything.” It head-on addresses the knee-jerk criticism that the 6S/Plus look like last year’s 6/Plus by showing people using all the new features, all of which are pretty cool. ★
The “M” and “H” in LVMH are Moët and Hennessy — champagne and cognac. That’s conglomeration. ↩︎
Interesting:
Today Logitech announced the Logitech Create Keyboard Case for iPad Pro, developed closely with Apple to leverage the new Smart Connector. As a result, Logitech will bring to market the first ever third-party keyboard compatible with the iPad Pro Smart Connector, eliminating the need to power on, set up or charge the keyboard — it is always ready when you are. […]
The Logitech Create Keyboard Case for iPad Pro will be available in the U.S., and select countries in Europe and Asia at the same time the iPad Pro is available for purchase. Additional product information and pricing will be available on Logitech.com and our blog in the coming weeks.
Yet another sign of “new” Apple: working with a third-party company like Logitech in advance of a major new product introduction.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt:
The chart below is based on Adobe’s analysis of 1.49 billion TV Everywhere authentifications in Q1 and Q2 2015. Between the iPad, iPhone, Mac, Apple TV and iPod Touch, Apple captured 61.9% of these viewers.
Windows PCs are in second at 18 percent; Android third at 9 percent.
And Apple hasn’t even launched its streaming video service yet.
I was wrong about one thing on this post from January: It’s come up way more than a thousand times already.
Lot of little birdies out tonight in San Francisco. The consensus is that there’s only going to be one Apple event this fall, and it’s tomorrow. So if there’s an iPad Pro, it’s coming tomorrow, no matter how much or how little sense that makes.
Two thoughts:
This sort of thing could be what’s been missing from all previous living room boxes — a way for a company that’s hustling, like Periscope, to bring something new to the game. Simply put: what the App Store did for phones, maybe it can do for the living room.
There’s a bit of irony here, given that Periscope has helped popularize vertical (portrait) video, and most people I know keep their TVs in landscape.
Last year’s September Apple event — the big one held at the Flint Center in Cupertino — had three main segments:
Here’s what my gut tells me to expect at tomorrow’s event, at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco:
Conspicuously absent from my guess is anything related to new iPads. I have no sources for this, no hints from any little birdies. This is just my gut feeling, based on Apple’s event schedule in previous years, and how long I think it will take for Apple to explain and demonstrate the three products above.
I’m going against the grain on this. John Paczkowski, reporting for Buzzfeed back on 7 August, said the new iPads (but maybe not the big new Pro model) were planned for this event:
Like Apple fall events past, this one too will focus on the company’s next-generation iPhones, which are expected to arrive at market with a pressure-sensitive Force Touch display, an improved camera system, and a significantly faster and power-efficient wireless chip. Sources say Apple executives are likely to show off the company’s latest iPads at this event as well, though that 12.9-inch “iPad Pro” seems to be a wildcard, still.
And then there’s Mark Gurman. Last week:
Apple’s September 9th event is set to be one of the company’s largest events in history, as is reflected by the expansive size of its San Francisco venue. Besides a pair of new iPhones, the substantially revamped Apple TV set top box, and new bands for the Apple Watch, Apple is currently planning to debut a pair of new iPads at next week’s event: the long-rumored iPad Pro, and a refreshed version of the iPad mini, according to trusted sources…
And then again, just yesterday:
Alongside the new iPhones, new Apple TV, new Apple Watch bands, and a gold anodized version of the Apple Watch Sport, Apple plans to debut a pair of new iPads on Wednesday: the larger iPad Pro and a new iPad mini.
Gurman and Paczkowski may well be right. But if they are, it doesn’t make much sense to me, and I’ll be very curious to figure out why Apple would want to announce all this at once, instead of splitting their fall announcements across two events, a big one in September and a smaller one in October — just like they have done since 2012.
One Event Scenario: Everyone agrees that new iPhones and a new Apple TV are set for announcement this week. I would be very surprised if Apple Watch didn’t get significant stage time as well — it’s a major new product heading into its first holiday quarter. The new iPhones are widely expected to have new force touch/taptic engine features — that’s the sort of thing that takes significant time to explain and demonstrate on stage. Plus, Apple usually demonstrates all the tentpole features from the soon-to-be-out-of-beta new version of iOS. Yes, they showed us those features back at WWDC — but they will show them again this fall, because that’s how it works. The new Apple TV is an altogether new platform — with a radical new remote and a full-on SDK and App Store, with a purported emphasis on gaming. That will necessarily consume a lot of on-stage demo time. If Apple is also going to unveil new iPads, including a major new 13-inch Pro model, that means either the event will run very long, or, some or all of these products will have rushed introductions and not get the time they deserve. And without the iPads being held for an October unveiling, there’s not enough left for a second event, which means that there will be no on-stage demonstrations or announcements for Mac hardware or OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) this year. It’s certainly possible that Apple could include the new iPads in this event, but there’s no way they could do the iPads and Mac/El Capitan all in this one event. Which means no Mac/El Capitan stage time this year.
Two Events Scenario: iPhones, Apple Watch, new Apple TV this week. That’s a full event, but not a crowded event. Then we all come back in mid-October for a second event, almost certainly at a smaller venue, where Apple reveals the new iPad lineup, new Mac hardware (like, say, the retina version of the 21-inch iMac) and Craig Federighi gets on stage to demonstrate all the new features in El Capitan. If “new iPads and Macs” were worth their own October event last year, why not again this year, when Apple is purportedly set to announce the iPad Pro? Especially given the way that Tim Cook remains staunchly bullish on the iPad’s long-term prospects, particularly in the business world — which, it seems obvious, is going to be a big part of the iPad Pro’s sales pitch. These new iPads would get more attention headlining their own (albeit smaller) event than they will if they get sandwiched between new iPhones and Apple TV.
It also seems to me that at one of these events, Apple will provide some sort of update on Apple Music. By tradition, that would be the September event, usually with a show-closing live performance (last year was U2). This would leave even less time to shoehorn new iPads into this week’s event.
Not only does the two-event scenario seem more likely to me, I’d go so far as to call the one-event scenario inexplicable. Possible, sure. But not logical.
Again, from Gurman’s post last week:
The “iPad Pro” (which is actually the planned name of the device) is currently scheduled to hit retail outlets in November, following a pre-order campaign that will launch toward the end of October, sources indicate. While whispers within Apple point to the MacBook-sized tablet making its debut on next week’s stage, it is possible that Apple could still hold back the larger iPad for an early October event given the currently planned November ship date.
If it’s not going to be ready to ship to customers until November — and the whole Asian supply chain rumor mill seems to back that up — this seems like another reason for Apple to wait until October to announce it, no? Occasionally, such as with the original iPhone and last year’s Apple Watch, Apple will unveil a new product months ahead of it hitting stores. But the iPhone and Apple Watch were brand new product categories. That doesn’t feel like something Apple would want to do with a new product model in an existing category like the iPad Pro.
Again, I could be wrong, and perhaps it will all be clear to me tomorrow, but as it stands right now, I don’t see why Apple would unveil new iPads at this event.
The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium is enormous, with a seating capacity of up to 7,000. Last year’s September event venue, the Flint Center, has a capacity of around 2,400. That doesn’t mean Apple is going to fill the place with anywhere close to 7,000 people, though. Anecdotally, talking to friends, it seems like press passes for the event are relatively tight — and they’re certainly not loose. It’s possible that Apple is inviting scores of people from industries where I don’t have contacts (like gaming and Hollywood), but even then, I can’t see the number of invitees expanding that much compared to last year. (And last year’s event had a slew of invitees from the fashion and watch industries.)
Remember that white pop-up building Apple built outside the Flint Center last year? It was a big hands-on area for all the new stuff that had been announced that day. My guess is that Apple is building something similar again this year — inside the auditorium. It would be like the world’s biggest Apple Store, for one day only.
Some post-publication comments from readers:
On @gruber’s piece:
- The only thing I heard is that iPad was happening, at least last week
- Big TVs need space
Interesting that he heard iPads were coming this week.
@viticci @gruber Best argument for announcing iPad Pro tomorrow is to give devs more time to optimize for new size and features.
That actually does make some sense. But last year, Apple did not announce the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus early to give developers time to adapt. Apple expects developers to be doing the right thing, with size classes and etc.
@gruber Just listened to your show. Don’t you think Apple would have had a controlled leak by now of no iPad Pro? Like no Apple TV at WWDC?
In other words, since so many people now expect iPads tomorrow, would not Apple leak the fact that there aren’t — if I’m right that there aren’t — to the NYT or WSJ or Bloomberg?
They might! The fact that no one claiming “sources familiar with the matter” has yet said otherwise is probably the best sign that I’m wrong. But, there’s a big difference between Apple TV missing WWDC and the iPads missing this week. After June, the next event was tomorrow’s, three months away. After tomorrow, the next event, if there is a second fall event, is only a month away. And there’s plenty of Apple news to fill that month:
Next thing you know, it’ll be mid-October and we’ll see the new iPads. If I’m right. If I’m wrong, I guess we’ll see them tomorrow. ★
The Macalope takes a look at a Fortune piece headlined “Why Android Wear Will Give the Apple Watch a Run for Its Money”.
iPhone users won’t be able to download third-party apps either, though this should be less of a dealbreaker.
Sure, who likes downloading apps? Practically nobody. Most of those “billions of apps downloaded” numbers Apple likes to report come from one guy in Duluth, Minnesota.
This guy has it completely backwards. The tight integration required between today’s smartwatches and their tethered phones means that anything other than a first-party solution is going to be rough going. Apple Watch only works with iPhone, and iOS is tied down such that no other smartwatch is going to offer a competitive experience for iPhone users.
Like I wrote two weeks ago, this is why I think the stakes are higher for Apple with the new Apple TV this year than they were for Apple Watch last year. Set-top boxes aren’t integrated with your phone. An iPhone user can freely choose a Roku or Fire TV or Chromecast and have a great experience. Apple TV has to be excellent, on its own, for it to succeed.
Matt Krantz, writing for USA Today under the headline “Apple’s Latest iPhone 6S Is Already a Bore”:
Other new products including the iPad, Apple Watch and Apple Music have failed to meaningfully diversify the company’s offerings — especially profitability.
Is the iPad iPhone-like in profitability? No — but nothing else on the planet is, either. I think most companies, including Apple, would love to add a new product with iPad-sized profits their offerings.
Apple Watch has been on the market for a grand total of four months, and has yet to see its first holiday quarter. Apple Music launched two months ago and every single person using it is still within the three month trial period. Where do they find people like this guy?
So great: Shigeru Miyamoto explains the design of level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros.
Jon Evans, in a piece for AOL/TechCrunch headlined “Don’t Be Apple”:
There is so much to admire about Apple. They make superb, beautiful products. Their amazing comeback story is unparalleled in corporate history. […] So why do I think they represent so much of what’s wrong with the tech world? It’s because they have, I think, an almost Shakespearean tragic flaw: their obsession with centralized corporate control of the devices they sell. […]
What could go wrong? Well, let’s get dystopically speculative for a moment. Can you remember some of the most hyperbolic overreactions to the fall of the World Trade Center, and how they were welcomed by large swathes of the American public? Can you imagine a future in which, following a similar tragedy, Apple rolls over and becomes a de facto arm of surveillance states? I sure can — and Apple’s centralized-command-and-control ecosystem would make it worryingly easy to turn every iOS device into an eye and ear of the panopticon, more or less overnight.
At which point we’d be forced to continue using these spyware Apple products because… ? And engineers at Apple would continue working for the company rather than resigning en masse because… ? And Apple would suffer no bad publicity for its cowardice because… ? Because: Tim Cook could surely flip a switch that would enable this surveillance without anyone noticing.
This advice is madness. Evans is recommending against using a platform that is secure and private today, from a company with a consistent decades-long track record in this regard, because in the future they might turn coat and become an accomplice of government mass surveillance, even though, if that came to pass, we could and would all just abandon the use of Apple products.
You can aim similar criticisms at Android, too, but they would miss the mark. Love it or hate it, Android is not near [sic] as centralized as iOS, and Google is not nearly as controlling as Apple. It’s open-source, and major organizations can — and do — fork it to create their own independent versions.
Parts of Android are indeed open source — “except for all the good parts”.
Apple fights an ongoing war with iOS jailbreakers, claiming that their work is “potentially catastrophic”; Google makes it especially easy to root Nexus devices. […]
Glenn Fleishman, writing for Macworld last month, “Hacking Team Hack Reveals Why You Shouldn’t Jailbreak Your iPhone”:
A massive breach in the private data of a firm that sells software to governments to spy on communications shows that jailbroken iPhones are vulnerable. […]
Two security outfits — the commercial Kaspersky Lab in Russia and academic Citizen Lab in Canada — first revealed in June 2014 that they had discovered and decoded Hacking Team’s smartphone-cracking software. The reports at that time indicated that only jailbroken iOS devices could be hijacked, but that malware could be installed on an iOS device when connected to a computer that was confirmed as trusted, and which had been compromised.
That external analysis has now been complemented by the Hacking Team’s internal documents. One price list shows a €50,000 ($56,000) price tag on an iOS snooping module with the note, “Prerequisite: the iOS device must be jailbroken.”
Apple works to close jailbreaking exploits because they are potentially catastrophic.
Back to Evans:
It may seem silly to criticize a fantastic company that makes superb products and delights its users on the basis of an abstract philosophical dispute.
Even the most jacktastic article usually has one true sentence.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that over the next year this dispute will grow more and more concrete. Maybe, as this contrast heightens, Apple will see the light; maybe instead of fighting jailbreakers, they will offer jailbreaking and sideloading as an option for power users out of the box, just as Android does. That alone would be a huge seismic shift.
But I’m not holding my breath. And until and unless that happens, I find it hard to recommend the iOS ecosystem in good conscience, despite its power and beauty, because Apple refuses to return any of the trust it demands from its users.
So let’s get this straight: Jon Evans is deeply concerned about a hypothetical dystopic fantasy scenario where Apple turns a 180, abandons all of the privacy principles the company has adhered to for decades and has prominently promoted as a competitive advantage, and begins cooperating with the U.S. government to surveil iOS users. To alleviate his concerns, Evans wants Apple to stop its efforts to close jailbreaking exploits, and in the meantime, he can’t “recommend the iOS ecosystem in good conscience”. This, despite the fact that in the actual world, today, we know for a fact from the Hacking Team data breach that various governments around the world — including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and Turkey — have been sold software that allows them to snoop on iOS devices, but only if the devices have been jailbroken.
I’m sure iOS users want Apple to get right on this. ★
