Two cents on Apple

Face tagging in Photos frustrates me sometimes. I know everyone uses apps like Photos differently and cares about different things. My wife & I mainly use Photos to keep track of the family photo library (around 30k pics over 10 years). About half come from iPhones, the rest Canon or Nikon. We curate out the bad or redundant, but err on the side of keeping more (not every shot has to be a masterpiece). We crop and tweak, but aren't heavy editors. We do albums for vacations or events (~10 albums per year) and do one photobook per year. And we feel strongly about having everything facetagged and geotagged correctly. Caring about facetagging is where frustrations come from. The machine learning algorithm's suggestions aren't perfect (I'll write a separate post about that), but that doesn't bother me too much. Such algorithms will never tag everything right: you can't expect an AI to know which kid is behind a Batman mask or who that person is with their b...

There's been talk for a few years now about Xcode potentially coming to iOS. Playgrounds could obviously be a step in that direction (although Apple could also use it just to give people a taste of Swift, and then convert them to macOS). Some people have well-founded doubts about whether iPad will ever be the right environment for development. As for me, it's #1 on my personal WWDC 2018 wishlist. Talking to people online and IRL, I thought I'd write out some thoughts around why Apple should do this, and why I think they haven't done it yet. -- First: why would Apple, from a business point of view, want Xcode to exist on iOS? It is undeniably a significant investment of time and resources. Apple would be right in asking "where's the return?" in order to prioritize it against other ideas. Will it bring be an influx of new developers or have most people with an interest in app development already bought a Mac? If there is untapped market potential, wil...

Plenty of reports today that Apple is getting closer to its long stated goal of creating its own original television content. Basically expanding the Apple Music formula into movies and television, to compete with the likes of Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Amazon. I really don't like this. Tech ecosystems are getting more sticky every year. Once all your contacts / photos / music are synced across all your devices in either the Apple or the Google / Samsung ecosystem, it becomes increasingly hard to switch. Do we want that ecosystem stickiness expanding into content? Let's think about what the next step might be. Is it that hard to imagine HBO launching Game of Thrones a day early exclusively on Apple devices? Netflix launching the new season on Daredevil exclusively on Samsung Smart TVs? A Disney-Apple alliance bringing Marvel movies early on Apple devices? Warner Bros responding by bringing DC movies early to Android devices? HBO offering John Oliver's political commen...

This one is off-topic so I'll keep it short. I read another article this week that tried to explain how Facebook's influence on the 2016 election was overstated, and just a fixable side effect of Facebook's real, more innocent core business model. Really? Facebook is a platform that generates revenue by letting advertisers send targeted messages based on its users' personal information. Organisations pay Facebook money to influence its users into doing things the organisations hope will make their investments worthwhile. The fact that domestic and foreign political interests want to tap into that power should not be a surprise to anyone. This is not a side-effect of the core business model - this IS the core business model.

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...