An unlikely report from Chinese site MyDrivers accompanied by an even unlikelier-looking graphic claims that Apple’s new 4-inch phone will not be named the iPhone 6c, as expected, but will instead be dubbed the iPhone 5e. The letter ‘e’ supposedly stands for ‘enhanced.’
The report also claims that the spec of the phone will be lower than previously rumored, having an A8 processor and 1GB RAM rather than the expected A9 and 2GB. This would essentially give it the same internals as the latest iPod touch.
I don’t buy it. The branding is just wrong. Apple will gimp itself if it releases a new product with an old number — 5 is old news. There was enough disappointment when Apple released the ‘iPhone 4s’ instead of the ‘iPhone 5’, purely based on the naming suggesting it wasn’t a big upgrade. In addition to the awkward suffix, ‘5e’ harkens back to old iPhone models. Taking it literally, the iPhone 5 was a 2012 device. The fashionability of iPhone buying is forfeited completely if you associate it with a 3-year old phone.
Even taking it at face value, it makes no sense. The MyDrivers report claims the device has A8 internals, but an iPhone 5 or iPhone 5s never shipped with an A8. The A8 chip first shipped in the iPhone 6. On this basis, the most logical suggested name is in fact 6c. The ‘5e’ moniker is weird, confusing, and associated with old tech.
KGI, as do many other sources, suggest that the 4-inch phone comes equipped with an A9 chip and NFC for Apple Pay. Taking this reliable path, the obvious naming choices is iPhone 6c or iPhone 7c. Out of these two, I think its a bit of a toss up as to what Apple would go for. 7c feels newer but it has the potential of upstaging the real iPhone 7 due in the autumn. However, it also has much better longevity as a name and will align nicely on store shelves next to the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.
That being said, if I had to bet, I would say iPhone 6c. It links to the likely internal specifications of the device (6s : 6c) and still feels connected to this generation of iPhone, not an ethereal future version. After all, the iPhone 6s has only been on the market three months. It’s still pretty ‘new’ in its own right.
Most of the improvement happens by the time you know your 7 times table. The odd bump at 10 is because the ability to approximate relies implicitly on knowing your 10 times table already (to be able to handle the trailing zeros).
But the improvement in error from 9% to 8% comes at a price. Knowing up to your 10 times table requires recollection of 100 facts (OK, 55, if you assume symmetry). But knowing up to your 12 times table is 144 facts. Improving the error from 9.3% of the result to 8.1% is a relative improvement of 12% in the size of the error. But to achieve that you need to memorize 40% more information. That seems like a losing proposition.
Look, the point of the Wolfram blog is to promote the Wolfram platform. Naturally, this blog post incorporates Wolfram computations. It feels a little forced, but the subject matter was compelling so I stuck with it. Interesting data analysis exploring the cost-reward tradeoff of learning higher order times tables. This sounds way more hyperbolic than I mean, but questioning stuff that is done because that’s how it’s always been done is how humanity moves forward. That reasoning applies to math and education as much as it applies to technology or anything else.
What’s also interesting is the frictions that hold up change, particularly on a situational basis. Compare how fast schools change the basics of the curriculum against how fast school dinner menus change to the latest healthy eating initiatives. If you want to tie this back into Apple, think about the headphone port controversy swirling around the iPhone 7. Digital has to be better than a 100-year old analogue standard, but the entrenchment of the 3.5 mm port is immense.
2015 saw the launch of the Watch, following six months of official Apple preamble and years of rumours. In retrospect, it hasn’t shook the Earth as a project concept in the way I wanted it to. Ignoring absolute sales number, the opinion from people that own Watches is very mixed. Smart watches seem like an inevitable future, perhaps in the same way all phones are smartphones. The current Apple Watch needs to do more to justify its cost and its place on the wrist. I think a lot of people got Watches for Christmas, but how many will keep using them? I think the Activity tracking is the best tentpole of the current Watch and the platform needs one or two more flagship features of that calibre to be a compelling product. Hardware-wise, I wish the screen went truly edge-to-edge and that the device was just thinner overall. I think the whole device should be as tall as the diameter of the Digital Crown. On this front, I have no reservations that Apple will deliver. The company is tuned to make progressively smaller, thinner and lighter pieces of aluminium and glass.
A year ago, the community was demanding software stability. Much of this frustration was derived from discoveryd woes. Apple fixed this in OS X 10.10.4 by removing discoveryd entirely and going back to the old networking stack, so thumbs up I suppose. iOS 8 and Yosemite had various other miscellaneous bugs and issues too and at least for me, iOS 9 and El Capitan are on a different level. I think we are back to solid ground with ‘classic’ Apple software; emergent platforms like watchOS and tvOS are less concrete but that is more understandable given their youth. Remember: tvOS is months old.
Sticking on software, Apple finally gave the iPad some love. In coordination with iPad Pro obviously, the iOS split-screen multitasking additions bring huge productivity gains to the entire iPad line. The iPad Air 2 triple-core SoC is finally given something to do. Picture-In-Picture is sublime — it’s the obvious low-hanging fruit for OS X 10.12. It’s a good base to truly make the iPad a Mac replacement. I want more of this in whatever form; three apps side by side on Pro, expanding PIP beyond just video playback. The Springboard app icon grid also needs a rethink when blown up to thirteen inches. I wish the skinny sidebar app stayed visible when browsing to the Home Screen - making it vanish complicates the mental model of what apps are running with no real benefit.
The iPhone update for 2015 was straightforward, featuring faster internals, new case colour, new camera stuff, etcetera. 3D Touch is a weird feature. It’s effectively implemented as power-user shortcuts with the dichotomy that it is being marketed as a mainstream feature. Being able to preview emails isn’t that compelling to the public. The friction of bouncing between views in the navigation stack is not perceived as a problem. The second-to-second delays grate geeks but are imperceptible to the ‘mainstream’. Anyone who uses Command+C and Command+V for Copy and Paste on the desktop will share the pain of watching someone else slowly use the menu item in the pulldown menus, watching their life waste away. And yet, that same, slow, sluggish, snail pace is the standard computing paradigm for eighty-percent of the population. I think this explains why 3D Touch hasn’t caught on. It’s also just hard to migrate past eight years of habitual back-forward behaviour. Heck, I would call my own usage of 3D Touch as infrequent.
A big of theme of Apple’s 2015 was accessories. Even excluding the vast selection of Apple Watch bands Apple now sells, it released more accessories than ever. The Pencil is the standout success — a pretty much flawless execution of a drawing tablet stylus. The Smart Battery Case was the most unexpected and probably the most controversial in the community too. I still think it looks ugly and goes against the company brand. I want Apple to make things that are functional and visually appealing. That’s how I see the company. Compare the Battery Case with the new Lightning-rechargeable Magic accessories. The keyboard and mouse are useful and beautiful pieces of hardware, making difficult compromises to optimise those ideals. My biggest complaint with the Magic stuff is the tacky nomenclature and the pricing — too expensive across the board.
On a personal level, 2015 was a good year. I finished university in June, which meant deciding what to do with my professional life. In February, Apple flew me out to Cupertino for a job interview but unfortunately I didn’t perform on the day. Nevertheless, it was a cool experience and eternally thankful for the people at Apple who made it happen.
Since July, I have been doing application development and consultancy as a full time business. It’s still early days, but it’s been doing well. Eventually, I hope to be able to devote my entire business to my own revenue-generating projects but client work is a rewarding and enjoyable stepping stone. On this blog, I pushed somecoolpieces and had my best months ever at 9to5Mac too. I was even live on BBC Radio once. As always, I’m very grateful for everyone’s support.
It may be vain, but I don’t care. Knowing people watch what you do is an empowering feeling. I was so happy to pass 3000 Twitter followers in October.
Ever wonder where most of the world’s knock-off Apple products and electronics come from? Recently, I took a trip to Shenzhen in China and got to check out the madness first hand. In Shenzhen, they’ll slap an Apple logo on just about anything and try to pass it off as legitimate. Needless to say, it makes for a very comical experience.
This video is so good. Dom bought a ton of random tech stuff he found and basically unboxes it all. It’s all counterfeit of course. What makes this so hilarious is that these aren’t bad clones of legitimate tech products. They aren’t merely ‘real fakes’, it’s so much more absurd. One example: There is a battery pack that is designed to look like an iPhone 6 with rear-facing FCC markings, camera holes and other such details. It isn’t a phone at all though, it’s just a portable micro-USB battery charger. So weird. Watch the video for a good laugh, including a fantastic demo of the Motorona brick phone.
Apple Pencil is a cool accessory but in the absence of any serious drawing first party software, it’s left up to third party apps to make the hardware sing. Watercolour and big brush art doesn’t fit the Pencil well, so I’ve focused on pen and pencil sketching. Paper is decent but my standout favourite is Procreate. The reproduction of the pencil strokes are incredibly realistic. I’ve sent several friends pictures of my sketches and they assumed it was a scan of physical paper, not digital stylus art. The digital brushes are that good.
Layers support is crucial for doing ‘tracing sketches’. The premise is simple. For people who can’t draw great freehand, you can draw over the top of an image from a website to get the outlines of the object in question. Then, you fill in the details as you see fit. I used this technique for most of the objects in the above photo. In Procreate, this is very easy to do. Import/paste an image from a website, reduce the opacity of the layer, and draw on top within a separate layer. Delete the image layer once you are finished tracing.
There’s no getting around it: Procreate is a complicated app. The menus offer a lot of customisation but they also get in the way. You can easily get lost in the various popovers and make destructive modifications to brushes, where the only out is to reset it completely and start over. Cut-Copy-Paste requires an awkward three-finger swipe gesture that I only discovered through googling for help. Paper is straightforward whereas Procreate requires some learning and experimentation. It’s frustrating because I think the app could improve usability significantly with a few interface refinements. Ultimately, though, Procreate yields a better end result so that has to be my recommendation.
Procreate has another killer feature — the Instant Replay mode. It pushes iPad art into a realm of its own. You can see the creation of the final product as well as the development from early-stage doodles into the final design. That video is interesting for me as much as it is for others. It acts as a reminder for me about what direction I was exploring before I ended up with the world theme; I apparently started this shot by doodling a bicycle.
Recreating what physical pens and pencils can do is great but enabling media that could not be created in the physical world is the best justification for digital art. I believe that’s why pixel art is so popular: there’s a beauty to the precision of the electronic grid. Making a video of the production is another one of these breakthroughs. Street-side caricaturists could draw their subject and then send them a video of the drawing over Facebook, in addition to the physical print.
“As you probably know from being a user of this now,” said Cook as he grabbed my iPhone 6, which was sporting the new case, “one of the real insights here is, have you ever used other cases and tried to get them on?”
Cook was pointing out the issue with cases, like those from Mophie, that are so rigid it takes considerable strength and patience to put them on and take them off.
“If you make this solid all the way across,” said Cook, indicating the spots where the Apple case’s embedded battery stops and you just have the soft fluoroelastomer casing, “in order to get it on, you’d find it very difficult to get it on and off.”
I love interviews with Cook that don’t focus on tax, equality or human rights. All those things are honourable aims, but listening to Cook’s take on the products he ultimately oversees is the most interesting stuff for me. Cook clearly doesn’t lead product development, although he is generally credited with the ‘invention’ of the iPad mini, but he always talks a lot of sense when talking about them. He highlights the real practicality of Apple’s case, conveniently ignoring the debate over the aesthetics.
What I wished Ulanoff had asked, though, is ‘did Jony Ive sign off on this?’. The Smart Battery Case is true to itself, there’s nothing unnecessary or indulgent in the design, which is a trademark Ive design point. On the other hand, another Ive design element is that the end result also looks good and I don’t believe the hump is appealing. It’s hard to say whether Jony would approve or not; he has created some wacky designs in his career.
My personal view is that Apple should have made the case uniformly thick, so the case is as thick as the battery at every point. That doesn’t mean they have to fill it with battery. I think it would be fine if those sections were effectively hollow, allowing the case to bend and remain flexible. This means the user could still flex the case for easy insertion and removal of the phone. Crucially, it would also be far prettier than the hump.
In 2013, we acquired Mailbox because we believed in the way it was making mobile email better. In 2014, we launched Carousel to create a new way to experience and share photos. With both, we aspired to extend the simplicity of Dropbox to other parts of our users’ lives.
Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making. It’s also about tough choices. Over the past few months, we’ve increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together. In light of that, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox.
I see a lot of people saying that apps die when they get acquired. Whilst this is technically true, it’s shortsighted reasoning. Mailbox had no guarantee of surviving on its own, it was a free app based on other companies’ email services with no revenue model. Mailbox could have died even sooner if Dropbox hadn’t bought them. I don’t know this for sure, it’s a possibility, but Mailbox might have decided to be acquired only because they knew the outlook for sustainability was bleak.
By the way, Eddy Cue’s son worked on Mailbox. Is he now working for one of Apple’s largest iCloud competitors?
My favourite thing about the iPad Pro is the speakers. They are ridiculously loud and strong and good. You can feel the reverberation going on inside if you touch the back of the tablet. Sound from both sides is clearly discernible and distinct, creating some nice stereo effects in games and TV shows. I can’t hear the changeover between the four speakers, but I have to assume it is happening (and working well) as I always hear balanced sound in every device orientation.
My favourite thing about the iPad Pro is the Pencil. I love just playing with the thing and making silly doodles and bad sketches on the beautiful Retina canvas. Tracing over an existing image with the Pencil in Procreate is strangely satisfying. Tilting the stylus sideways to do shading is futuristic. The stylus is not a toy, it can be used for serious drawing work if you have the graphic design streak inside you. Sadly, the Apple Pencil won’t automatically make you a great artist.
My favourite thing about the iPad Pro is the 12.9 inch screen. When the iPad was first announced, I explained it to myself as a multitouch A4 piece of paper. This wasnt really true because much of the iPad front is bezel, not screen. In terms of display real estate, 9.7 inch iPads are significantly smaller than a school notepad and that only gets worse when you account for the necessary UI chrome apps must display. The iPad Pro, however, is the realisation of that digital paper vision. The screen can comfortably contain an A4 page with plenty of space left over for user interface controls and toolbars. Its overall size reminds me of a typical ringbinder. The quality of this screen is fantastic. I can’t explain why but the sharpness of text and crispness in photos looks way better than a Retina iPhone or other iPad.
My favourite thing about the iPad Pro is the split-screen multitasking. This is my first iPad with proper multitasking support and its surprisingly good. It feels a lot better to do the actions and gestures than it does to describe the metaphorical model. Being able to have two 9inch apps on screen side-by-side is incredibly useful. A very common pattern for me is to have Twitter docked in a side column whilst doing some casual sketch tracing in Procreate.
My favourite thing about the iPad Pro is Picture-In-Picture video apps. On iPad Air, I love Picture-In-Picture despite the fact it often gets in the way of what I am doing. The Pro’s size means the PIP window rarely obscures the main app content. I use the TVCatchup app to glance at live TV whilst surfing around the web in Safari. PIP works alongside Split View, so you can technically have 3 apps on screen at once. Apple should explore ways to make the PIP windows work for more than video players. Imagine PIP mini apps like a transient calculator or a floating turn-based chess game.
My favourite thing about the iPad Pro is its overtly powerful chips and generous 4 GB RAM. Last night, I tapped on a 3D game from the Home Screen and it launched instantly. The A9X is fast but not that fast. Turns out, I had last played it two days ago, it was still frozen in RAM. The app ecosystem needs improvements to meet the A9X power: iOS iMovie is a very basic video editor, Pages lacks customisable paragraph styles, GarageBand uses a 9.7 inch UI (Apple PR was showing a truly updated iPad Pro version way back in September, but it has yet to appear in the App Store). Photo apps and drawing apps are leading the charge here, for obvious reasons.
My favourite thing about the iPad Pro is all of this stuff. I love it. The iPad Pro is a fantastic entertainment device with some real work use cases that are mediocre and some real work use cases that are better than Macs. The growth between iOS 8 and iOS 9 for iPad showed that it had been floundering for a few years as a second-class citizen. The problems raised in Panels, Popovers and iPad Pro no longer apply but there are plenty more challenges and refinements to tackle for iPad iOS. I want to say I wrote this all on an iPad Pro, but I can’t because of numerous impracticalities that get in the way. I sincerely hope Apple continues investing in iPad software for iOS 10 and beyond.
We are excited by this new chapter in the story of Swift. After Apple unveiled the Swift programming language, it quickly became one of the fastest growing languages in history. Swift makes it easy to write software that is incredibly fast and safe by design. Now that Swift is open source, you can help make the best general purpose programming language available everywhere.
Open source FaceTime was a claim never materialised and now sits in stark contrast to Swift. Apple has exceeded expectations with the public Swift, posting full source code for the compiler and standard library, an Objective-C independent interpretation of the Foundation framework, libdispatch for Linux all accompanied by extensive documentation and a full commit history of the repo dating back to the first push from Lattner in July, 2010.
Perhaps even more out of character, the Swift documentation includes for both rejected proposals and future planned changes to the Swift language. You can read about language changes that were being explored, tentative usage examples and reasons why the components were scrapped. Apple has tipped the hat on significant language changes that would in any other year be secret until WWDC 2016. Going forward, upcoming potential changes will be added and likely discussed with the community, giving developers intimate access to the project’s evolution. This is a monumental outlier, in a good way, when compared to the rest of Apple’s framework engineering.
Again, Mac OS X lacks some of the more advanced media consumption features of iOS. There is no system-wide support for Picture-in-Picture on OS X, for example. This means that watching a video on the side while working requires you to manually arrange your workspace just so. That is, if you even can. Few websites support resizing the video player inside the page, so you are limited to the fixed dimensions of that video and you get whatever is left over to do your work in. Compare that to the flexibility of size and placement you get with the iOS PiP window, which can even be placed off-screen.
Mac OS X also suffers from a much smaller range of available apps. Instead of the native apps you get on iOS for services like Netflix, Airbnb, Google Docs, YouTube and the like, Mac users have to make do with accessing these services through a web browser. That’s quite a hoop to jump through to get your work done: forcing such a huge proportion of your work through one app.
Clever post by Fraser Speirs, reviewing a MacBook as an iPad replacement. I still think the MacBook is the primary computer recommendation for any random user but its certainly true that reviewers overlook many of the iPad’s raw advantages in their comparisons.
This part-satirical part-serious comparison is great in that highlights the things about iOS devices that tend to go under-appreciated. In the course of making its point, it naturally ignores the common iOS shortcomings, so it’s by no means an unbiased commentary, not that it is really supposed to be.
Apple seems to plan removing the headset jack from the next iPhone 7, according to a reliable source.
Supplied Ear Pods will equip a Lightning connector, which means a DA (Digital to Analog) converter is required. The DA will be built in the Lightning connector without sacrificing the size, according to the source.
Put your iPhone flat on the table, look at the edges. It’s not hard to see what parts are getting the chop next. Like it or not, Apple wants iPhones to get prettier and prettier every chassis generation which largely revolves around thinness. The 3.5 mm headphone jack is on the chopping block; it’s the thickest element still standing.
The real question surrounding this rumor isn’t whether Apple would do this or not (they would), it’s the ramifications on customer satisfaction. I don’t have statistics to back this up but I would bet that most iPhone users connect the bundled EarPods headphones. Given that Apple will ship a pair of Lightning-equipped EarPods in the box, you’ve already removed the friction for a lot of the customer base. In regard to third-party accessories, it is true that there are few Lightning headphones available today. However, iPhone sales are so huge that there will be hundreds of Lightning headphones on the market, if/when it transpires that the iPhone 7 lacks a 3.5 mm jack.
It’s the classic chicken and egg problem, except with one big fat chicken.
I must say, Music Player & Playlist Playtube manager is a truly remarkable app. Its novel colour scheme of black, gold, grey, and coral breaks new ground. The various bugs that immediately present themselves prove that this developer understands how important it is to “always be shipping”. Perhaps most notably, in a market suffering a race to the bottom, this developer showed true entrepreneurial spirit by charging $3 and putting up a full-screen modal advertisement every few seconds.
As interesting as the app was, my attention immediately fixated on the prominent menu item titled “Reporting”. Tapping this composed an email – addressed to me, titled “Report & Contact”, and eager to capture your thoughts and feelings about the app.
This is an interesting issue where miscreant developers are using support and contact information from unrelated legitimate companies. You could argue this is exactly the kind of issue the App Store process is supposed to catch and it is. Metadata validation is the thing App Review checks on a very consistent basis. This particular issue though is time consuming and complicated to verify. If Apple wanted to solve this properly, it would need to tie email domains to registered developer Apple IDs which has its own set of problems.
At least in this case, the publicity of Steamclock’s blog post caught the attention of Apple developer relations and the bad app was pulled. This is probably a pointer towards the most likely solution for this on a wider basis: a ‘report a problem’ system that understands this is an issue that needs addressing by Apple, not individual users.
For me, the Retina MacBook is like a sleek motorcycle that gets me to and from work in style without sacrificing my ability to use the same roads as someone driving a MacBook Pro and iMac. iPad Pro for me isn’t in the same category; it’s more like a portable home theater with a big screen and killer sound system where I can lounge and be entertained. Everyone will use these devices differently, but that’s where I’m at with the Retina MacBook and iPad Pro in their current form.
I wrote about the iPad Pro as the best toy ever the other day, drawn from the lust of a product that I still want and haven’t yet bought. Toy sounds condescending but I really don’t mean it like that, even if it does invoke memories of little kid Fischer-Price figurines and play sets. When I said toy, what I was really saying is that iPad Pro is a great entertainment device for movies, casual drawing with Pencil, laid-back web browsing, iOS gaming with the possibility for light work too. I concur with Zac’s summation.
In terms of wider market, the pricing is the issue. Few people can justify a thousand dollar purchase for a device that doesn’t really do anything other devices, like phones and laptops, can do. Lust alone does not cause sales. I live in this world and I’m barely stretching to it. That’s the stance of the masses here. There is a segment of people who can get real work done on an iPad Pro, but I continue to believe that segment is small and almost identical in size to the number of people who were already doing real work on iPad Air.
In fact, the two complaints I have about hardware impact the speed of the iOS user experience. The iPad Pro doesn’t use the second-generation Touch ID sensor employed on the iPhone 6s (Apple confirmed this to me) and the device doesn’t have a 3D Touch display. Lack of second-generation Touch ID makes the unlocking and authentication experience in apps a bit slower than the latest iPhones, but equal to Touch ID on the iPad Air 2. I’d like to see Apple adopting the crazy fast Touch ID sensor on the iPad Pro as well. As for 3D Touch, I struggle to imagine how the one-handed operations of peek and pop would scale to a 12.9-inch tablet, but I know I’ve been missing the ability to access 3D Touch shortcuts on the Home screen.
These are the funny omissions in the otherwise ‘Pro’ hardware. When you call something pro, your expectations are reasonably inflated to have high-end internals. There is a bitter taste for buyers here, where there isn’t just one device where you can get everything that’s new in iOS hardware.
I think super-fast Touch ID isn’t in the Pro for supply-chain reasons. Producing Touch ID sensors has always been a bottleneck for Apple so I’m pretty sure this is the case here. They need every sensor they can get for the millions of iPhone 6s produced every day, so the other devices have to suffer with the scraps and use the first-generation sensors. Note also that the new iPad mini also uses the older Touch ID.
Regarding the lack of 3D Touch in the iPad Pro, I think there’s several factors that add up to Apple skipping it for the first generation. Some of the reasoning is purely qualitative assertions about user experience; ergonomically ramming your finger into something you hold in your lap is nowhere near as satisfying as a phone that you can hold steady upright.
At a technical level, I think adding the 3D Touch force sensors to an iPad Pro is much more complicated than adding it to an iPhone. Why? Because on the iPad Pro, the screen technology is very different due to the need to detect electromagnetic pulses for the Apple Pencil. There are very thin margins in which to fit such components and perhaps it’s technically impossible to add both 3D Touch and Pencil support with Apple’s current engineering methods.
Finally, the omission of 3D Touch is great for product differentiation. The iPhone 6s is all about 3D Touch, every ad mentions how Peek and Pop can change the way you do things on the phone. Frankly, the iPhone is Apple’s flagship product so it almost needs to be ‘more advanced’ than its siblings in some way. Meanwhile, the iPad Pro is marketed along different axes — namely Power and the creative drawing potential of the Apple Pencil. Throwing 3D Touch into the mix alongside the Pencil, which does indeed track pressure but for a whole different purpose, would surely confuse the messaging.
“Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones,” Cook argues in his distinctly Southern accent (he was born in Alabama). He highlights two other markets for his 12.9 inch devices, which go on sale online on Wednesday. The first are creatives: “if you sketch then it’s unbelievable..you don’t want to use a pad anymore,” Cook says.
I think the iPad Pro is a fantastic product concept. A beautifully-large Retina touchscreen with a precise stylus input for drawing and annotations. This is like the coolest Apple product of the year. The lust factor to just get one of these, scribble around in Paper, make some doodles, play some games, is immense. I can’t justify the iPad Pro as a purchase because, for me, it’s a toy.
The iPad Pro has definite utility for many groups of people but not me personally. I can’t realistically get my work done on it, development is out of the question and writing news coverage on iOS is tough.
Covering news requires too much context switching with the need to repeatedly flick between Twitter, Safari tabs, CMS editor, HipChat and more. Doing that on iOS is very annoying, slow, sometimes impossible. Something as simple as copying a paragraph to use it in an article as a quote is extraordinarily difficult to do on an iPad. Compare that to a Mac, where a copy-paste keyboard shortcut can be executed in a fraction of a second.
Moreover, I’m not a good artist. I can’t really draw that well, so the advanced features of the iPad Pro + Apple Pencil as a drawing tablet are lost on me. Doodling with the Pencil is as far as I’d go really, for the novelty and gimmicky entertainment value. Combined, this makes the iPad Pro an expensive toy, for me and my situation. I really want one though. If Christmas wish lists stretched to the $800 mark, an iPad Pro would be at the top of mine.
The new Apple TV Netflix app is visually more impressive and perhaps makes discovering new content easier, but navigating to core places in the app is noticeably more difficult. The newer version is a definite step backward in usability from my experience. The main view is split in two parts: a detailed preview on the top half and content navigation on the bottom half. Moreover, the focus is only ever on one row of results at a time. A large Netflix logo hides much of the second row.
Finding the My List section is actually quite hard with the new app. It’s right at the bottom of the list, the 37th row from the top. In fact, My List is located below obscure film collections and series recommendations that Netflix somehow considers more important. Once you discover that it takes several swipes down every time you want to access your saved shows, the new layout on the 4th-gen app feels a lot more limited than its predecessor.
With the old Apple TV, every app was basic but had a baseline user experience and inter-app consistency due to the generic templating system that Apple provided to channel makers. The new Apple TV is like the iPhone; developers have freedom to do whatever they want, present UI however they want. This means the apps can be more capable and more rich than ever before, but it also means media companies have the freedom to screw up and do stuff badly/lazily. The Netflix logo placement in this screenshot is just ridiculous.
Hopefully, media companies will invest into tvOS app development and this situation will improve. Right now, the best video experience comes from the iTunes Store (expensive) or apps like Plex and Squire, which stream (pirated) TV shows and movies from a network computer or NAS. Just imagine a world where Apple’s interface expertise can be combined with top-rated premium content.
