Two cents on Apple

There's been discussion  for  years  about Apple's vision for the Mac. The argument goes that iOS brings the majority of Apple's revenue, so the Mac plays second fiddle. Remember the  backlash  around the MacBook Pro  introduction, with its TouchBar with embedded iOS , causing Apple to insist that it really really still loves the Mac. Meanwhile, the iPad is maturing into a productivity device. iOS on iPad feels like a whole seperate OS . Because of this, whole segments of the Mac's typical target audience, such as students and writers, are finding themselves at home in iOS . While existing Mac users are likely to continue using their Macs for the time being, the influx of new users may slow down if iPad Pro sales are cannibalizing Mac sales. Is this bad for the Mac? Personally, I think not. I would like to offer the argument that when the Mac loses these "light productivity" customers to the iPad, the result will be a more homogeneous audience for t...

Marco Arment  has an excellent article up where he hits the nail on the head around Apple's reasons to #embracethenotch . I agree with his reasoning but disagree strongly with his conclusion that this was " courage ". I think it's the exact opposite. There's only one point of view from which it makes sense, and it's a bad one for Apple. From a purely aesthetic point of view, the notch shouldn't exist. It has a nice 1970's Star Trek vibe going on, making it timelessly futuristic, but that also makes it feel dated from the moment it's released. It doesn't make it beautiful per se. I don't think anyone will dispute that if Apple had had the technology to integrate these sensors into the display from day one, they would have done so. They didn't introduce a notch just because it looks good; otherwise, they would have added one to the bottom as well . So no, the notch is not beautiful in itself - it's a design compromise. So people s...

Apple isn't known for being humble in its keynotes. It modestly grades its own products on a scale from "amazing", "phenomenal", and "magical" all the way up to "revolutionary" and "insanely great". Still, phrases like "setting the path for technology for the next decade" are reserved for big occasions. Steve Jobs used such expressions in his comeback period when talking about NeXTStep that became Rhapsody that become OS X. He called the PowerPC to Intel transition a "brain transplant" to "set Apple up for the next decade". And he used it in when introducing the iPhone ("5 years ahead of the competition"). But that's about it. "The next decade" remains an expression that hasn't been watered down yet by overuse. And when Apple does choose to use it, it's usually justified in hindsight. And still, The New Yorker called the iPhone X novelties  mundane . Forbes agreed wit...

For some years now, there has been a race between Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and others to create the best voice assistant. The interaction model for each of them is that the user asks a question to the One Assistant, which either answers the questions directly or dispatches it to a number of 3rd party provides applications. The main contenders are each gradually increasing the number of domains their assistants understand, gradually expanding their keywords and ontologies until eventually at some point in the distant future they are supposed to cover everything we do in daily life. In doing so, they allow 3rd party developers various degrees of integration to include their own functionality into the One Assistant - but at the end of the day, the user still interacts with the assistant as a single "personality". Lately I've been wondering whether that interaction model is the best approach technically, or for us as a user, or for Apple as a business strategy gi...

Unless you've been living under  a rock on mars , you may have heard that the advanced iPhone which Apple plans to release tomorrow (the one without the home button) will most likely be called the " iPhone X ". But since that information was found in text form only , the open question is whether that will be "iPhone ten" or "iPhone ex". I'm going to put a stake in the ground here (knowing this may not age well beyond tomorrow) and pick a side. I think it will be "iPhone X", pronounced “ex”, for three reasons. First, releasing the "iPhone ten" alongside the "iPhone 8" is strange and clunky marketing. It invites the question "what about 9?", which triggers  unwanted comparisons with the competition . It puts the 8 and 10 products in direct competition with each other, which reflects badly on the iPhone 8, and may actually end up driving customers towards Samsung instead. It also boxes Apple in for next year...

At the 2007 iPhone launch, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed "iPhone runs OS X" . In practice, iOS was relatively feature-limited and buttoned-down compared to macOS. It took Apple years to re-build the feature richness that macOS enjoyed in a modern and secure way for the mobile age. Successive iOS releases improved the situation, and especially the last 4 years iOS made big leaps forward. Between iOS 8 and 11 we got app extensions, split-screen multitasking, APFS, drag-and-drop and a Files app. Together these brought iOS almost to the level of productivity of macOS. People are now using iPads as primary work machines, which was unthinkable in 2012. This is great for the iOS ecosystem. As certain categories of pro users (writers for example) flock towards iOS, the market for pro apps grows. The app store thrives, and Pro apps like Ulysses, Scrivener, Pixelmator, Affinity have no trouble finding an audience of professionals paying good money. The ongoing debate around subs...