I’ve watched a lot of technology congressional hearings and most of them are a farce, either due to limiting time constraints or lack of technical knowledge to cover intricately nuanced technical matters. The January 17 hearing on online platforms was a rare exception. It was an intelligent session, and I’ve been thinking over what was said there a lot. The hearing predominantly skewers Amazon and Google’s practices, but Apple’s position as platform auteur was brought up a fair few times as well.
The Apple discussion was spearheaded by panel participant Kirsten Daru, vice president of Tile, the leading manufacturer of Bluetooth trackers. Their grievances are rooted in the fact that the Apple’s Find My app is a system app, installed by default, and gets elevated privileges to behave in ways that third-party apps in the App Store cannot. The conversation is slightly complicated by the fact that Apple’s ‘AirTags’ product is not official yet, but I don’t blame Tile for starting to gain traction for a cause that is clearly waiting in the curtains.
Tile fears that Apple is about to enter their market and steamroll over them. They are correct. Assuming a basic level of competency on the part of Apple’s implementation, the AirTags will be better than what Tile can offer in every single way.
They can clone the baseline feature set, and integrate it directly into a stock iOS system app. Apple will let its tags interoperate with the Find My network, made up of the hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads running iOS 13. Tile has spent years trying to build its ecosystem, to convince users to downloads its app and become nodes in the network, and all of a sudden here comes Apple which can offer worldwide coverage for its trackers out of the box. Finally, the U1 chip present in the latest iPhones will enable the exact location of the AirTags to be precisely visualised in augmented reality.
The particulars of this product category allow Apple to enter the market late and easily crush everyone. The Apple tracker will be at least as good as Tile’s offerings, and superior in a few ways that Tile can never catch up to. I don’t think that’s debatable. What needs consideration is whether Apple can do that because they are acting with monopolistic malice.
To its credit, Apple has said it will change the behaviour of "Always Allow" location alerts in a forthcoming software update, following complaints from the developer community.
In the hearing, Daru complains that iOS 13’s repeated location permission alerts disfavours Tile, imposing hurdles on third-party apps that Apple’s Find My don’t have to contend with. I’d say that is indeed unfair and anticompetitive; third-party apps should be treated the same as Apple’s. The problem is how far do you take this. If Apple’s apps and third-party apps must be concomitant partners, should Apple then be forced to remove Find My as a built-in installed-by-default application? That seems like a step too far, beyond what would be deemed reasonable.
Daru also voices her company’s frustration that the U1 chip does not have a public API and therefore unavailable to developers. She argues that anyone should be able to use the ultra-wide band technology in the iPhone, saying that UWB is a standard and the only thing that makes it proprietary is Apple’s decision not to expose an API for it. Should Apple be compelled to open up the U1 hardware? If so, what about direct access to the Infrared cameras or the phone modem or the cellular antenna or the myriad other key internal components. Personally, I don’t think that a manufacturer should be required to allow access to every component of the products they make. Otherwise, you could equally argue that Apple should be forced to let anyone build alternative launchers and the like, and that just seems wrong.
But it’s that exact freedom to lock the platform down that allows the platform proprietor to make choices that benefit itself. Let’s say Apple never provides an API for ultra-wide band. That means every other company will never be able to match the AirTags on features. Is that a monopolistic move, or just inherent to the state of play? I really don’t know how you can distinguish the two.
I want to learn more about the creative process behind the piece and engage with the ideas of whatever media I’ve just seen. I want to see alternate takes the filmmakers opted not to use in the final work and hear commentaries from those artists, or the scholars who can teach me more about what I’m watching. I want to explore. I miss special features. I miss the context and bonus content that would come with DVDs, ones that encouraged me to stay with a movie even after watching it. In the age of limitless content and fully customizable menus, this experience is all but dead.
The core element of a streaming service is basically set in stone — have compelling things to watch and be able to play them wherever you are — but there is scope for differentiation beyond the basic premise of a video repository. At the highest level, there’s the way that the app chooses to present its content, help the user keep up with their favourite shows and discover more TV. This is obviously something that Netflix has perfected and something that the Apple TV app does very poorly right now.
You can also stand out with features like the X-Ray mode in Amazon Prime Video, a modernised version of the cast and crew list that can tell you who that actor is on the screen right now. It’s cool. Over time, I hope all the streaming services pay more attention to extras like this, and that includes a much wider bonus content offering.
Apple is in a theoretically strong position to do this. In addition to things like set tours, bloopers and commentary tracks, Apple could pair the shows with behind-the-scenes podcasts, music playlists and the like. In fact, they are already making Apple Music soundtrack playlists but basically no one knows that they exist because they aren’t linked to or advertised in the TV app at all. You have to manually trawl through Apple Music to find them.
A lot of stuff in this arena is just tying up loose ends of existing produced material. For example, in a recent setofads, Apple commissioned artists to make concept posters for some of its titles. However, Apple hasn’t actually used the posters anywhere but the ads showing them being made. What a waste. Wouldn’t it be great if you could see those posters beneath the show in the actual TV app? What if you could tap on them and set them as your wallpaper?
Apple has marketing teams running social media for its flagship series like The Morning Show, and these accounts have posted many soundbite interviews with showrunners, cast and crew members over the last few months. All of these are essentially lost to time in the endless scroll of Instagram and Twitter feeds. This kind of table stakes stuff should be easily accessible from within the TV app itself.
In the March unveiling of Apple TV+, Apple’s Jamie Erlicht said “this is not just another streaming service”. To date, Apple has not delivered anything unique to really back that up. The first priority for them should be to fix the badly-made application, but that’s all just catch up to meet the status quo. Beyond that, extras and bonus content could be a way for Apple TV+ to stand out. They have the means.
Since getting the new MacBook Pro in 2016, I have used it with an OWC Thunderbolt Dock. This dock is highly convenient and delivers on the potential of the laptop’s Thunderbolt 3 ports; I plug in one cable for power, network access, and accessories.
For several years, I relied on a Synology for my Time Machine backups. In the latter half of last year, though, this workflow started exhibiting problems. On a daily basis, I would get errors from Time Machine that my backup was inconsistent and it needed to start over. I was used to getting that error about once a month, but it triggering every day was untenable. It meant every morning, my machine would spend five hours copying the entire contents of its SSD to the network storage.
After several rounds of troubleshooting, I gave up on Synology for Time Machine and plugged in a local hard drive to the OWC dock instead. I have found this much more reliable. In fact, since switching over, I am yet to see a Time Machine verification failure.
However, this set up came with its own annoyances. Namely, every evening when it came time to unplug the laptop, I would have to remember to eject and unmount the locally-connected drive. The highly convenient one-port lifestyle was now mired by another mandatory step. This wasn’t a problem with the always-on networked Synology, but the local drive is bus-powered and macOS will complain that the disk was “Not Ejected Properly” if you don’t go through the ceremony to eject it first.
I messed around with some Mac automation — bash and cron — but the result was unsatisfactory. At the start of 2020, my colleague Zac Hall also switched from an iMac to a laptop-and-dock solution, and started being annoyed by similar disk ejection requirements.
This was the ultimate motivation to package up my shell scripts into a finished app. EjectBar is the result. EjectBar is available in the Mac App Store. It’s a menu bar app that you can click on to show your connected drives and eject them one-by-one, or you can right click on the icon and it ejects all of them immediately. You can also set a schedule for EjectBar to eject drives automatically at a specific time of day. I set mine for 6 PM, which means I never have to remember to do anything when I’m packing up my desk at nighttime.
It’s designed to be aesthetically discreet; a simple monochrome menu bar icon that even dims when no drives are connected. And it’s available in the Mac App Store, so you don’t have to mess around with installers or hacky permissions.
In the WWDC 2019 presentation, Craig Federighi praised the new UI for text selection, saying “there’s no need to double tap and no magnifying glass getting in your way”. I remember doing a double-take when he said it because that’s not really true at all. The magnifying glass was a convenience, rather than annoyance. Getting rid of it sounded like it would be exactly the wrong thing to do, especially as there was no alternative UI affordance to fulfil its purpose.
Benefit of the doubt and all, I let it play out through the betas. Unfortunately, the end result is as bad as I feared. On iOS 13, the magnifying glass may not “get in your way” but your fingers certainly do.
Xie says Twitter is adding a new setting for “conversation participants” right on the compose screen. It has four options: “Global, Group, Panel, and Statement.” Global lets anybody reply, Group is for people you follow and mention, Panel is people you specifically mention in the tweet, and Statement simply allows you to post a tweet and receive no replies.
Brands are definitely going to be making use out of the Statements mode. Below almost every brand tweet I see, often when the brand has paid for the tweet to be promoted to a wider audience, are replies from people complaining about something about the company’s products that is completely unrelated to the tweet content. This happens on Twitter and Facebook alike.
For example, there’ll be a post in my timeline from a UK carrier about some new phone deal. Inevitably, the top comment will be a complaint about no signal and slow data in a particular area, or a terrible in-store customer service experience, being kept on hold for too long, or something along those lines. I always chuckle when I see it because these companies are indirectly paying to have customers complaints spreads more widely.
A Statement option would close that hole and make promoted posts much more like traditional display advertising. A public placard with no interaction.
Separately, I think Twitter certainly risks losing some of its ‘community’ if all celebrities suddenly switch to posting in Statement mode and thereby hiding all reactions to their tweets. I find a lot of the fun of Twitter is that feeling of everyone being able to jump in the same conversation.
Take something like Tim Cook’s recent tweet about the Golden Globes. It is pretty entertaining to go to the comments and see people quipping about the elephant in the room — Gervais’s provocative opening speech — and also some actual factual debate was also spawned off of those knee-jerk jokes. I would be sad if in the future Cook posted everything as a Statement and I could no longer click through on his tweets and see those kind of responses.
There’s also the more serious issue of being unable to correct someone who shares something that is fake or misleading, if that person has disabled replies. Twitter is already criticised for promoting echo chamber tendencies.
My gut feeling here is that ‘people in the public eye’ should not have access to these controls. That is imperfect though because there are plenty of public personalities, like world news journalists for instance, who are the subject of the abuse and harassment that these policies are ultimately trying to help. I will say that I have no intention of limiting who can reply to my tweets. I like the openness of Twitter, plain and simple. (Granted, I speak from the position of someone who has been fortunate enough not to be the subject of online harassment in my decade online.)
The industry Working Group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol. The project intends to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance, and others. The decision to leverage these technologies is expected to accelerate the development of the protocol, and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.
The project aims to make it easier for device manufacturers to build devices that are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others. The planned protocol will complement existing technologies, and Working Group members encourage device manufacturers to continue innovating using technologies available today.
Tech alliances rarely deliver on their initial promises. Some seem to exist for years without anything meaningful to show for it. Others break up after a bit. Some work. Some work for a while until the big companies have a fall out, the commitments waver, and you slowly end up back at square one.
The smart home industry has certainly seen a plethora of partnerships in recent years, most not really achieving anything of significance. What Connected Home over IP has going for it, is that they have somehow managed to get every big player together; platform leaders in Apple, Google and Amazon as well as the main accessory manufacturers like Samsung, Philips Hue, the lot. They also have noble aims; an open source smart home protocol for smart accessories. This isn’t some private pact that locks others out.
Arguably, this whole thing benefits Apple the most. It's a way to dramatically increase the number of HomeKit compatible accessories on the market.
Positive intent is better than none at all, and so the chances of a better smart home ecosystem are unquestionably higher today than they were the day before this was announced. Like everyone else, I was sceptical the moment the news broke. Why would these companies suddenly want to play happy families, after five years of constructing fiefdoms?
Well, I think I’ve figured out the motivations. This open protocol commoditises access to appliances and accessories. For manufacturers today, getting their stuff to work (and certified) with proprietary platforms is expensive and time consuming, especially for HomeKit. An open initiative should break down those walls and reduce costs. For Apple, Amazon and Google, they don’t base their business on the smart home accessories themselves. Their interest is in the voice assistants, in the intelligence layer, in the hardware and services that manages the accessories. And this doesn’t threaten that at all.
So, with that in mind, I’m not as doubtful as I was initially. The wins for customers may be small, but still welcomed nonetheless.
This year, Apple paid more attention than ever to its end-of-year commendations. They invited press to an intimate media briefing in New York to announce their App Store Best Of 2019 picks, beyond the normal press release. Apple also made a big song and dance about 2019 music. iTunes has released top song lists and ‘artist of the year’ editorials for as long as I can remember, but this year they formalised proceedings into official Apple Music Awards. The winners receive an awesome custom physical trophy, featuring a 12-inch disc of silicon as a perfect fusion of modern technology and vinyl throwback. They even held a celebratory concert at the Steve Jobs Theater.
However, in an awkward state of affairs, I feel like they invested far more effort into the ceremony of the thing than the actual process of award-giving. The chosen picks are predictable and uninspired. It doesn’t seem like they took any risks and mostly stuck to name brands and big companies. It makes for a very dry list of featured apps. I also think it is hilarious that in the same year Apple launched a dedicated App Store for Apple Watch, they did not have a Watch category at all. It just seems like such a waste to host this non-event event with such bland recommendations underlying it all; contrast the Best Of list to this year’s Apple Design Awards this year, which was a much more diverse and interesting set of apps but was honoured with far less fanfare.
On the music side, Apple Music’s inaugural awards had meagre ambitions. Apple Music normally makes a huge deal about the breadth and depth of their huge catalogue with playlists for all genres and moods. Yet Apple gave out just five awards for 2019, three chosen by editorial teams and two based on global play counts. With three out of five of this year’s awards being given to the same artist, the need for more diversity is even more highlighted. At the very least, there should be awards for every genre of music. They could do a lot more that emphasises unique elements of Apple Music; awards picked by Beats 1 hosts, some kind of sing-along lyrics tie in, most streamed music video, the works. I hope they have a better all-round showing for 2020.
Nine titles is not a lot. Eight TV shows and one movie, and one of those shows is the Oprah book interview. However, I think Apple did a decent job at spanning the gamut of content appeals. Shows for adults, shows for children, and an all-family documentary film. From what I’ve watched, “The Morning Show” has the best story, “See” has the best visuals, “For All Mankind” has the most novel plot with a lot of potential, and “Dickinson” is just plain fun.
There was a lot of speculation in the last couple of years that Apple was heading towards a family friendly tone. The launch dramas obviously dispel that myth comprehensively. Almost the opposite, there is not a TV+ show that is actually appropriate for the whole family to enjoy together. The children’s programming isn’t sophisticated enough in story to entertain adults and the adult shows contain far too much swearing/sex/violence to be kid friendly. The three Apple originals scheduled for the rest of 2019 are also decidedly adult material.
What’s missing is something like “Doctor Who”, something that you can watch on a Saturday night after dinner before its bedtime. “Amazing Stories” seems like it was the property meant to fill exactly that gap. It’s rated TV-PG and we have heard that it was destined to be one of the Apple TV+ launch shows — until production was delayed.
For nine titles, I think Apple did about as well as they could have done. The response from critics was definitely not what they were hoping for but the general audience reaction seems to be up to par. Their challenge now is to keep delivering on this formula at a pace that is fast enough to fend off competition from other original content services.
The abundance of 12-month free trials have enabled them to debut with a small library offering but they need to expand quickly if they want people to start paying for real when November 2020 rolls around. On current pace, they will have about 35 original titles in a year’s time. That puts them somewhere between passable to good in my evaluations, depending on the number of smash hits they chance upon. The proposition is much stronger in the second year when the TV+ library will be closing in on a hundred titles.
AirPods revolutionized the wireless audio experience with a breakthrough design, and now AirPods Pro take it even further with a new class of lightweight, in-ear headphones engineered for comfort and fit. Each earbud comes with three different sizes of soft, flexible silicone ear tips that conform to the contours of each individual ear, providing both a comfortable fit and a superior seal — a critical factor in delivering immersive sound. To further maximize comfort, AirPods Pro use an innovative vent system to equalize pressure, minimizing the discomfort common in other in-ear designs. AirPods Pro are sweat- and water-resistant, making them perfect for active lifestyles.
It is interesting that Apple chose not to give these stage time at the September event, only to be available for holiday sales a month later. It seems unlikely that the fate of the product was unknown then. Manufacturing and freight alone make up a several week lead time. Obviously, the AirPower embarrassment looms over the company but I haven’t quite worked out the new policy; the Mac Pro and Deep Fusion are just two examples of things that they had no qualms in previewing ahead of time.
The new AirPods Pro are a logical addition to the AirPods family. I bet for a lot of people, the draw of AirPods Pro is simply having another shot at a design that is comfortable for their ears. ‘One size fits all’ AirPods did a good job at covering a wide spectrum of human ear shapes, but clearly there were people left out — either due to comfort or looseness. AirPods Pro, and its three choices of ear tips, should fill in the gaps.
The change from a double-tap to a press is something that I hope trickles down to the normal AirPods. The double-tap gesture means pushing the buds down your ear canal, with a relatively strong intensity lets the AirPods not detect your intent. With the new force sensor in the stem, the idea is you can just pinch either side of the stalk, mimicking the press of inline buttons on old Apple wired headphones. As you press down evenly with a finger on both sides of the stalk, the AirPods Pro themselves should stay fixed in place and it won’t be anywhere near as uncomfortable as the tapping.
The Beats Studio and newly-released Beats Solo Pro feature active noise cancellation. It is effective but carries a fairly significant battery life penalty: the headphones boast 40 hours of music listening, but only 22 hours when active noise cancellation is turned on. Battery life is essentially halved. Because of this, when the design of the new AirPods Pro leaked, I automatically assumed that the noise cancellation features would be achieved by way of the natural sound isolation of in-ear buds, that is to say, passively. However, that is not the case. The AirPods Pro actually do have active noise cancellation (and a transparency mode like the Solo Pro). But what is intriguing is the quoted battery life impact is only half an hour. You get 4.5 hours of music playback compared to the normal 5 hours of AirPods battery life. I guess we’ll have to wait for the reviews to see if Apple took any shortcuts to achieve this feat.
The $250 price feels a little high although clearly Apple is going to have no trouble selling these given how in demand AirPods are in general. The price elasticity is obviously there. I hope Apple can find a way to get rid of the AirPods with (non-wireless) Charging Case SKU. The lineup does feel a little bloated. In a perfect world, you’d just have AirPods at $149 and AirPods Pro at $199.
If you take interest in Apple — as in Apple the company — like I do, then you have to care about Apple TV+. As much as some people might want it to be, TV+ is not a side project or distraction. It’s not like iBooks textbooks or iWork in iCloud.com. Over the last two years, Apple set up a dedicated video division and they mean business. Just this week, news broke that Apple is spending an estimated $100 million on the production of a single film. Apple’s overall (and ongoing) financial investment in TV+ content must surely eclipse the budgets of many of its hardware projects.
You can not care about television, or not be interested in the shows Apple is making. But if you care about the machinations of Apple, then television programming is a fascinating venture to follow. In particular, one aspect that has piqued my curiosity is the pace of Apple’s content rollout. Looking beyond the launch, Apple hasn’t really shown us anything of what it has coming in the pipeline apart from quick glimpses as part of a one-minute Apple TV+ sizzle reel.
The M. Night Shyamalan production "Servant" debuts on Thanksgiving, November 28th.
Today, Apple announced that its “Truth Be Told” drama will be available from December 6th. With that date now out there, we can know work out how much maximum runway Apple has with the launch lineup, as listed on tv.apple.com.
The company revealed in its September press release that most shows will be released according to the following schedule: three episodes upfront, with the remaining episodes of the season on a weekly cadence.
Apple’s television projects have between 10-12 episodes per season. If you take December 6th as the latest possible starting point, then Apple will exhaust its entire cache of TV+ launch content … by the end of January. Even in regard to TV+ movies, “The Elephant Queen” is available on November 1st and “Hala” is coming in December. “The Banker” will follow in January, and Apple hasn’t said anything about any other films so far.
You can laugh at the fact TV+ only has a dozen different franchises, but that’s the state of the game right now. It’s not like Apple is going to be sit on the launch catalogue for a year. They can’t. Almost all of the launch lineup will have ended before 2020 starts, and we don’t expect to see the next seasons of those shows start for the good part of a year.
To keep to Apple’s promise of new content every month, in the most pessimistic case of every show being on the gradual one-a-week schedule, Apple will have at least doubled the number of available shows by March. Throw in three or four movies too.
What shows are these going to be? We don’t really know. This Wikipedia page lists all known Apple commissions, but it’s not clear which of them are in the can and ready to go. “Little America” is the only one I know of that is close to being released; that’s the anthology series produced by Kumail Nanjiani which Apple talked about at the March event.
Furthermore, the aforementioned press statement also says that some shows will drop an entire season of episodes at once, binge-style. Naturally, Apple’s need to put out new shows quicker accelerates for every show that is released in that manner. I had assumed that clause was referring to mostly kids content, like the Snoopy cartoon or “Helpsters”. It turns out that some of Apple’s premier shows are also adopting that strategy. Hailee Steinfeld recently revealed to Jimmy Fallon that “Dickinson” will be one such case, all 10 episodes available on November 1st. (Apple has been running broadcast and social media adverts for “Dickinson” like it’s no tomorrow.)
This whole thing is a whirlwind and I can’t wait to try out the service and watch how it grows. Maybe Apple’s first ten shows will all be terrible and a miserable flop. As calculated above, it’ll only be a handful of months before we can reassess with an as-yet-unknown lineup of a dozen TV+ original series.
We have cable TV at home. I rarely watch anything live as it airs. Everything is recorded, and the fast forward button on the remote is probably one of the most worn keys. Adverts suck. When you are introduced to a better world, it’s really hard to go back. I hate TV ads even for the duration that I’m fast-forwarding past them.
Whatever the ethicalness of DVR’ing television and skipping the ad breaks is, the simple fact is you can’t do the same thing with apps. If there’s an ad-ridden game, you are seeing the banner ads. You are watching the interstitial ads. Often, you complete a level, you are subjected to watching a sponsored video, and then you get kicked back to the menu screen which has a persistent banner across the bottom.
If ads are one tier of ickiness, the pseudo-gambling virtual currency mechanisms are a million times worse. Nevertheless, that is the status quo of the App Store. It’s so dominant that it’s actively difficult to find titles that do not feature those things. In many cases, a game will have both ads and in-app purchases galore.
Arcade has value on that axis alone; a simple place to find games that do not have those distractions and borderline casino business models. It also helps that the Arcade games are good.
There are currently about 70 titles on offer, spanning a diverse set of genres. There’s puzzle games, RPGs, endless runners, the works. There’s really deep adventures and other games suited to be played in bitesize five-minutes-of-fun chunks on the bus. Apple is promising there will be 100 Arcade games before the end of the year.
I’ve been playing What the Golf, Assemble with Care, and just started Don’t Bug Me. They are engaging and work great on the iPhone. I’m having fun playing with them and not seeing a single ad in that time is — truly — a breath of fresh air. I play Words with Friends with my family, and its egregious usage of advertising is more annoying than ever before. Before, I’d put up with it. Now, I actively detest it. And Arcade has been out for a fortnight.
I’d love for Arcade to offer an ad-free Scrabble clone. Arcade has a word game called Word Laces. It’s fine, but the best thing about it is that it is ad-free. What’s weird when you are playing Arcade titles is that your brain is accustomed to freemium tropes. You are primed to expect a paywall screen that your gems have run out of juice or you need to buy this lightning bolt gizmo to progress. And those things just don’t exist.
Word Laces has a lightbulb button that gives you a hint if you get stuck in a puzzle. It took me a week to have the innate confidence to tap it because my brain was avoiding it, automatically ascribing it as some sort of in-app purchase thing. Nope. You tap the lightbulb, you get a hint.
Apple’s marketing describes the Arcade library as a collection of “groundbreaking” titles that “redefine” games. I don’t get that feeling. The games are not really innovative, they are pretty standard. It’s almost like putting the Steam indie catalogue on your phone. I haven’t seen any Arcade game so far that surprised me with an innovative premise. I don’t care. I like that the games are new releases, offering new content, and I like that they are fun. Being “groundbreaking” is not what interests me.
Arcade is great. You should try it. $4.99 for six people spanning iPhone, iPad, TV and Mac is good value pricing. Nevertheless, it’s not perfect.
I mentioned I downloaded three Arcade games to my phone. I also downloaded many more titles and promptly deleted them after a few minutes, including some of the flagship Arcade recommendations like Hot Lava and Oceanhorn 2.
They aren’t bad games, but they aren’t suited for the phone. Hot Lava really warrants an iPad-or-larger screen to be enjoyed, and the touch control scheme is unplayable. I don’t know how anyone could get past the first level in Hot Lava without a controller with physical buttons. Even more trivially, the performance of the game is poor. It makes my phone run really hot and my 2015-era iPad Pro exhibits terrible FPS. Oceanhorn is a bit better phone optimised, but it still feels too constrained.
Arcade has a lot of games that are clearly not designed for the iPhone and yet probably fantastic TV, iPad or Mac experiences. Similarly, a physical game controller is effectively required for some titles. However, Arcade is careless in this regard. The storefront is identical across every platform and is not personalised for you, or your devices.
A big part of the value proposition of Apple Music is its carefully-curated playlists of songs. Arcade doesn’t have much of that. I don’t think Hot Lava should be the top recommendation when I’m browsing the Arcade tab on my phone. The store shouldn’t recommend games if the device I am browsing with is too underpowered. Seriously, try playing Hot Lava on an Apple TV HD, the non-4K model. It’s a mess of jaggies and dropped frames. Yet when I updated my Apple TV to tvOS 13, Arcade was proudly recommending Hot Lava as a daily play. It reflects badly on Arcade, and it reflects badly on the Apple hardware.
Arcade needs better curation and better organisation. Arcade doesn’t really have categories to browse by genre and there are no charts for ‘most played’ or ‘hot’ games. It’s hard to even view the entire catalogue of games. You have to open the Arcade tab in the App Store, scroll to the very bottom, tap ‘See All Games’ and then scroll a flat list of games in reverse-chronological order. This will only become more unwieldy as new games are added.
Arcade is also a very isolating experience because there is effectively zero social integration. All the games diligently implement Game Center, supporting high scores and achievements. There should be a single place where you can see progress across all of your Arcade games and compare against other people, at least the other people in your Family Sharing group. Even something akin to Apple Music’s ‘Friends Are Listening To’ feature would go a long way.
It’s almost claustrophobic to pack all of this stuff into one tab inside the App Store app. Perhaps, they would be better off with a dedicated Arcade app that can have sections for your library, game recommendations, Game Center achievements, top charts, and search. Interestingly, the Apple TV actually does have a dedicated Arcade app, but there’s no additional functionality exposed there yet. It just mirrors what is shown under the Arcade section in the App Store.
I was also disappointed to find some games inside Arcade that behave like they depend on freemium mechanics, even though they don’t. These games were obviously in development before Apple approached them with its service and have been quickly ported over with the in-app purchases removed. Sonic Racing is a good example of this. It has so many things you can unlock that intrude on the actual gameplay, that only exist because they were meant to be avenues for monetisation. Sonic Racing isn’t even optimised for notch phones; the top toolbar on the game’s main screen is cut off by the Face ID camera housing.
Apple should not have let these big publishers get away with being so tasteless. Apple should scrutinise the finesse of every game, regardless of who made it. Arcade is meant to be a premium service of good games after all. And it mostly is, but there are a handful of slackers in the mix.
As it stands, the infrastructure of the Arcade storefront is at minimum-viable product level. I think Arcade is off to a great start but I hope there’s a lot more in the pipeline. We also have to keep abreast of what new games are added, at what frequency, and whether they maintain the generally high standards of quality. It’s also not entirely clear to me … can a developer choose to leave Arcade and take their games out of the subscription? That would sour the appeal of the service significantly.
The 2018 iPhone XS and iPhone XR lineup was wonky. Price and iPhone price perception was one thing, but even on technical specs, the 2018 iPhones clashed with each other. The cheapest phone could be more appealing to a hypothetical consumer with unlimited budget because of the battery life. The XR summarily trounced the iPhone XS in longevity. With the iPhone XS, and iPhone X before it, you would have to baby the phone to get you through the day. In comparison, the XR was a care-free vacation of unrestraint. The XS Max was close to XR battery, but the Max is out of the question for a lot of people because it is simply too big.
What this meant was that even tech journalists would migrate to the iPhone XR and not the high-end XS line. The benefits of ‘unlimited’ battery dominated the draws of a slighter nicer screen and a second rear lens. There is clearly a problem in the product line when the most dedicated, most technically-minded, portion of the user base are not attracted to the top models. The XR was not complementary, it was cannibalistic.
So, with the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro, this imbalance has been rectified. In fact, all three phones are advertised as getting better battery life than the XR. And it’s a clean straight line as you would expect. Based on Apple’s reported video playback durations, the iPhone XR gets 16 hours — that’s the baseline. The 11 beats it by an hour, the Pro beats it by 2 hours and the Pro Max extends the gap further for a monstrous 20 hour battery life.
If you have an effective unlimited budget, there is no way you are picking the $699 iPhone 11. The discounted XR doesn’t have a chance to win either. Now, your choice is a simple matter of ergonomic preference: iPhone 11 Pro, or iPhone 11 Pro Max.
Obviously, the biggest news in terms of customer interest is the new iPhone lineup. The focus really is on the camera, this year. The new triple-lens system is the hero feature of 2019 and I bet Apple spends a lot of time on it. The camera improvements will be a lot more substantial and deep than just a wider angle zoom mode. It has to be significant; the iPhone is already falling behind the market in key areas of the camera. This is the year where they have to catch up, but also surpass the status quo in some areas to justify the unsightly trinocular module. I’m expecting a major leap here. Gurman hinted as much in his event rundown.
In contrast, I am not expecting much from the Apple Watch department this year. I feel like Apple front-loaded a lot of changes with the Series 4 last year, and they aren’t ready to make another technological leap. I believe Apple are going to continue selling the same Series 3 and Series 4 models through the holiday season, perhaps with a price drop, and the addition of some new case colours and finishes (ceramic, titanium).
My colleague Guilherme Rambo reported that first-party sleep tracking features are actively in development, but I personally don’t think they are launching that this year. Sleep was not mentioned at WWDC, which logically implies that Apple is holding the feature for new hardware, otherwise they would beta test it through the summer. However, I’m working on the presumption that there is no new Watch hardware this year. Maybe it’s a surprise Series 4 addition for the holidays, but I’m sticking to the idea that sleep tracking is not launching until 2020; a timeline first voiced by Bloomberg earlier this year.
I think the other hardware announcement will be the Apple tracker/tag/tile thingy. It’s a perfect iPhone accessory and Christmas gift idea. Where other trackers like Tile have struggled is the ramp of the network effect. You need a big user base to make the mesh location feature useful, but how do you attract customers if the critical mass isn’t there? Apple’s tag won’t have this chicken-and-egg problem because they are making the entire Apple device install base part of the mesh automatically, with iOS 13 and the other platform software updates. The tag will be just be another beacon in the Find My network, for any nearby iPhone to detect and flag down. This kind of accessory is an easy sell for Apple, perhaps priced at $40-$50 each.
That’s all in regard to hardware expectations; iPad updates and the new 16-inch MacBook Pro are primed for an October unveiling. Naturally, Apple is going to use the attention of the iPhone event stage to showcase its service offerings once again. There will be Apple Arcade game demos. There will be a rundown of what the debut show lineup is for Apple TV+. Whilst I don’t think either service will be available simultaneously with iOS 13, I think Apple will release at least one full episode of their original shows on the same day as the event. They can whet people’s appetites for the impending Apple TV+ launch and gather a few more early bird signups. That is how you fully capitalise on the captive audience and worldwide interest of a new iPhone news cycle.
I predict that there will not be a bundle. They might try and pair Apple TV+ with other Channels like HBO or Disney+, but I would be astonished if they attempt to do an ‘Amazon Prime’-esque subscription of everything Apple for one price. That kind of thing is a desperation play, a fallback if it transpires that they cannot successfully sell their services as standalone products.
With its first foray into video subscriptions, Apple is weighing different release strategies for shows. The company is considering offering the first three episodes of some programs, followed by weekly installments, the people said.
Apple hasn’t announced pricing for Apple TV+, but is weighing $9.99 a month, the people said, which would match Apple Music and Apple News+
I have been expecting a $9.99 base subscription price for Apple TV+ ever since it was announced. Apple is pitching it as a premium video service and premium video services are not free, or free perks when you buy an iPhone or whatever some people were hoping. Apple is investing billions into original content because they want to make billions, driving Services revenue higher.
The question for me has always been how they get this off the ground. With a clear aversion to licensing a library of back-catalogue content, launching this service is always going to be tough. Can Apple really debut a TV subscription that offers 5-12 shows and expect people to pay for it?
The proposition for Apple TV+ in two or three years time is palatable, when the company has several seasons in the archive and a roster of shows and movies numbering in the hundreds. Those first months, the first year even, that’s the really hard part. The launch period is also when the service will have the most attention, the most scrutiny, it’s the time when people will make up their minds if Apple has got it right or wrong.
Bloomberg effectively says Apple’s TV+ will launch with at least five shows, and be priced at $10 per month. The publication says Apple is considering releasing the first three episodes of a show at once, and then transitioning to a weekly broadcast schedule.
I think the only feasible path for them is to price Apple TV+ at the $10 level, but pair it with a really long trial. We’ve seen them do three months for Apple Music, and one month for Apple News+. A three month trial for TV+ would mean the day-one accounts would get to see most of one season of a debut show, so maybe Apple’s plan is to get someone hooked on a storyline before actually taking their money.
What if Apple TV+ offered a six month free trial? This would be the longest trial for any Apple property to date, but it might just be what they go for. It gives Apple some breathing room to expand its library of aired originals, build buzz and start accruing viewer retention. Apple has said it will be adding new films and shows every month, so six months is a long enough time period that the service would actually have some meaningful intrinsic value by the time people actually had to start paying for it. They could time it so season two of of their hero titles, like “The Morning Show” and “See”, kick off just as the free trials come up for renewal.
Apple’s finance SVP Luca Maestri even hinted as much on the last earnings call. He was pretty open about saying “all these services there is a trial period upfront, it is going to be different trial periods” and “the road to monetisation takes some time”. I think he was priming investors to cool off a bit and to not expect the video service to contribute to 2019 holiday quarter earnings.
On a related note, this week Guilherme Rambo found code references to indicate that Apple is currently planning a $4.99 monthly price for the Apple Arcade subscription. I think there is a good chance that will change by next month’s announcement; it is just too cheap. Apple will not want one of the News/TV/Arcade trio to significantly undercut the others. News+ has set the $10 benchmark and TV+ certainly looks to be heading in the same direction. Arcade is a strong offering and warrants the premium positioning of its cohorts. $7.99/month is the lowest it will go.
Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or “grading”, the company’s Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned.
Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. They are tasked with grading the responses on a variety of factors, including whether the activation of the voice assistant was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was something Siri could be expected to help with and whether Siri’s response was appropriate.
When your company is running marketing campaigns that constantly accentuate a privacy focus, it is incongruent to keep stuff like this in the shadows. Apple didn’t try to hide that this is happening but it didn’t do much to keep people informed either.
On its machine learning blog, Apple explained how they use customer voice samples to validate the accuracy of "Hey Siri" detection.
The iOS Security white paper says Siri voice recordings are saved for six months with an ‘anonymous’ identifier that can group recordings from the same person together, and then the recordings are kept for at least another two years without the associated identifier. It says the saved audio is “for use by Apple in improving and developing Siri” with “ongoing improvement and quality assurance”. What it does not say explicitly is that these recordings are reviewed and assessed by humans.
If you give it a second of thought, then of course these clips have to be peer-assessed. To improve software to be more human-like, you need humans to label the training data sets and check sample outputs. However, this indirection may not be immediately obvious to people who don’t understand have a firm grasp of how machine learning works. The onus should not be on the customer to know, or to guess. The paragraph should say it explicitly; something like ‘anonymised recordings are reviewed by Apple employees for ongoing improvement and quality assurance of the Siri service’.
It’s also important to point out that the content of the white paper is not what is shown to a user when they activate Siri on their iPhone or iPad. The “Ask Siri, Dictation & Privacy” screen focuses on how Apple handles your data to process Siri requests in the moment, and the copy quickly glazes over the retention policy details. It does not mention the six-month or two-year periods for example.
What is also weird is that Apple has no opt-out for Siri data retention. You can turn off Siri completely and Apple will delete any data on its servers that can be traced back to your account, but you cannot elect to use Siri and not have Apple keep data to improve the service. Plenty of other iOS features provide this granularity, with dedicated options to “Improve Maps”, “Share iCloud Analytics” and the like. It’s a strange omission that Siri offers no such controls.
The worst parts of the 3D Touch user interface was the home screen quick actions system. The quick actions are useful, but the gesture of applying force to an app icon clashed with the gesture of long-pressing on the icon to make the icons jiggle and enable editing of the home screen arrangement. They are technically wholly independent interactions; one based on time, one based on pressure exerted. In reality, people found it nigh-impossible to differentiate those actions. It’s hard to long-press on a screen without also pressing firmly.
This overlap resulted in a laundry list of issues in iOS where the same UI elements would respond differently to pressure and long-press gestures. The home screen was by far the worst offender, though. Jiggle mode has existed since the dawn of time. All of a sudden, starting with the iPhone 6S, ‘long-pressing’ would sometimes work correctly and sometimes trigger this strange menu of actions — with no escape hatch.
The new design in iOS 13 beta 4 is definitely an improvement over what came before. 3D Touch, Haptic Touch and long-press gestures are now standardised into this one context menu system. If you press down on an icon and wait, the quick actions menu always displays first. If you keep waiting with your finger still on the display, the menu dismisses and jiggle mode activates. If you apply force when you press down on the screen, i.e. using your pressure-sensitive iPhone display, then the same sequence of events happen. The benefit you get from 3D Touch now is that it reduces the delay before the quick actions menu is shown, thanks to the more affirmative initiation.
Moreover, if a user does release their finger early, the new system is still forgiving to the ‘average user’ who probably just wants to edit their home screen. This is because the quick actions menu now includes a “Rearrange Apps” item. Tapping this button enters jiggle mode. You can’t really get stuck in the wrong place anymore.
There are a couple of warts as of beta 4. It would be better if all of the new iOS 13 context menus featured taller rows. They are barely 44 pixels tall; this means small font text, tiny icons and not too much leeway in where your finger can be when you are quickly sliding around. In the old 3D Touch menu design, the buttons were like three times the size and the ergonomics were better for it.
The “Rearrange Apps” button is a great addition (and something I’ve been advocating for a while) but it is a bit lazy to just append it to the bottom of the other actions. It should be distinct from the app actions, probably as a pill button in the corner of the screen, like the Done button that appears when jiggle mode is active.
They also have this seamless transition from sliding to select an action in the menu to dragging the app icon if you keep going. This is a clever shortcut but it’s frankly a bit finicky right now. I find that the safe zone of the pan gesture is too small; it’s far too easy to start moving the app icon when you don’t mean to. And when that happens, the result is a messed up home screen. Not the nicest thing to have to deal with.
Hopefully, these niggles will get patched up by the time iOS 13 is finished. Overall, it’s a much better experience. And it’s an experience that is consistent across device type. It doesn’t matter what kind of screen technology your device has, all iPhones and iPads have access to the same features, and they all behave (mostly) the same.
