Apple Archive

John Khelt: It took Apple 6 years to correct its last mistake, the trashcan Mac Pro. Part of the reason for Apple taking so long to correct mistakes is so many apologists uncritically support them. The pundits don’t get how outrageously insulting it is to drown out and ignore what enthusiast/users say they want (e.g., Macs with upgradable slots) and instead decree what pundits think you need and should be happy with. That level of uncritical support helps Apple ignore problems. The pundits are sure they know best. Remember, they declared how the trashcan Mac was also for pros, rather than being critical about how it served neither pros nor enthusiasts. Despite being wrong then, they’re happy to reassert the same now. The pundits can’t seem to think beyond wanting to curry Apple favor. Being an Apple sycophant has its privileges after all. Maybe they’ll get to interview some Apple exec where they’ll ask banal questions and incessantly fluff Apple plastic talking points. And if they don’t play ball and choose to call Apple out on mistakes, maybe they wont get the next Apple event invite. But maybe, if more pundits could think for themselves, and more of them would speak up for enthusiasts and users, then just maybe, Apple would be motivated to do a better job. Right on the money.

And then there’s SwiftUI, which may be a harder concept for regular users to grasp, but it’s a huge step on Apple’s part. This is Apple’s ultimate long game—an entirely new way to design and build apps across all of Apple’s platforms, based on the Swift language (introduced five years ago as yet another part of Apple’s long game). In the shorter term, iOS app developers will be able to reach to the Mac via Catalyst. But in the longer term, Apple is creating a new, unified development approach to all of Apple’s devices, based in Swift and SwiftUI. Viewed from this perspective, Catalyst feels more like a transitional technology than the future of Apple’s platforms. Apple’s own SwiftUI page provides more details. This is the future of application development across all of Apple’s platforms, so if you have a vested interested in the Apple world, you’d do good to get yourself acquainted with it.

I wasn’t available for about a week due to emigrating from The Netherlands to Sweden, so I’ve clearly got some catching up to do when it comes to Apple’s WWDC keynote. Apple detailed iOS 13 for the iPhone, the renamed iPadOS for the iPad, macOS Catalina for the Mac, updates for watchOS and tvOS, and so much more. I’m not going into great detail on everything here, since you’ve most likely already delved deep into these new releases if you’re interested. I do wish to mention that I’m insanely happy with mouse and multiwindow support for the iPad – it turns my iPad Pro into a very useful and powerful device, and I can’t wait for the first keyboards with built-in trackpad to come onto the scene. I’ll keep the other big announcement – the new Mac Pro – for a separate item and discussion thread.

When John Bumstead looked at listings for his products on Amazon.com in early January, he was waiting for the guillotine to fall. A small online business owner from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Bumstead specializes in refurbishing and selling old MacBooks, models he typically buys from recyclers and fixes up himself. But on January 4th, Bumstead’s entire business dwindled into nonexistence as his listings were removed from the platform due to a new policy limiting all but the largest companies and specially authorized providers from selling Apple products. Apple made a special deal with Amazon to basically exterminate all third party repair services and used Apple product sellers that aren’t specifically approved by Apple. The result is a sharp increase in pricing on used Apple products sold on Amazon – exactly what Apple wants, of course – and smaller, non-Apple approved resellers are dying off. Charming. And people actually claim Apple has morals and values.

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) will investigate whether Apple abuses the position it has attained with its App Store. ACM will do so following indications that ACM has received from other app providers over the course of its market study into app stores. That market study has been published today. Henk Don, Member of the Board of ACM, explains: ‘To a large degree, app providers depend on Apple and Google for offering apps to users. In the market study, ACM has received indications from app providers, which seem to indicate that Apple abuses its position in the App Store. That is why ACM sees sufficient reason for launching a follow-up investigation, on the basis of competition law.’ This will be a long, protracted legal battle – in multiple European countries.

9to5Mac has a long list of features that are coming to iOS 10.3. The biggest change is definitely multiwindow on the iPad, which iOS sorely needs. There are many changes coming to iPad with iOS 13, including the ability for apps to have multiple windows. Each window will also be able to contain sheets that are initially attached to a portion of the screen, but can be detached with a drag gesture, becoming a card that can be moved around freely, similar to what an open-source project called “PanelKit” could do. These cards can also be stacked on top of each other, and use a depth effect to indicate which cards are on top and which are on the bottom. Cards can be flung away to dismiss them. This definitely will make iOS a far more mature and capable operating system, and I can’t wait to try this out on my iPad Pro. All it needs now is proper mouse support, and we got ourselves a proper operating system.

There are many good reasons to own an iPhone: your social life might revolve around iMessage, you might value Apple’s emphasis on privacy, or perhaps you appreciate the quality of Apple’s displays and software experience. But the one thing that once exemplified Apple’s lead over the Android chasing pack, the iPhone’s camera, is no longer top of the list of reasons to want an iPhone. The iPhone camera has fallen behind, and it’s now something users tend to accept rather than anticipate. A fun little game you can play: whenever an article mentions the importance of iMessage, you can safely assume the article is intended for an American audience. Outside of America, nobody cares about iMessage – it’s just another junk app

As Apple continues to fight legislation that would make it easier for consumers to repair their iPhones, MacBooks, and other electronics, the company appears to be able to implement many of the requirements of the legislation, according to an internal presentation obtained by Motherboard. According to the presentation, titled “Apple Genuine Parts Repair” and dated April 2018, the company has begun to give some repair companies access to Apple diagnostic software, a wide variety of genuine Apple repair parts, repair training, and notably places no restrictions on the types of repairs that independent companies are allowed to do. The presentation notes that repair companies can “keep doing what you’re doing, with … Apple genuine parts, reliable parts supply, and Apple process and training.” This is, broadly speaking, what right to repair activists have been asking state legislators to require companies to offer for years. At this point, Apple’s fight against right to repair is basically just out of spite and pettiness. Apple must be such a sad, sad place to work.

News content is a sensitive topic in China. The government exercises a significant degree of control over information sources so it is unsurprising that Apple would choose to not support News there. However, instead of simply being locked behind a hardware feature gate, Apple chose to disable it much more forcefully. If you enter China with a US iPhone (e.g. one purchased in the US from a US carrier or at a US Apple Store), using a US carrier, with your phone set to the US region, and with location services disabled for the News app, you will still receive this message upon opening News: To accomplish this censorship Apple is using a form of location fingerprinting that is not available to normal applications on iOS. It works like this: despite the fact that your phone uses a SIM from a US carrier it must connect to a Chinese cellular network. Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app. This information is not available via public APIs in iOS1 specifically to improve privacy for users. This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network. I had no idea Apple went to such great lengths to please the totalitarian Chinese government. Fascinating, though.

Vlad Savov, always ready with the eloquent takes: Or, maybe, you only give off the appearance of wealth. This being a credit card, the Apple Card is also a symbol for the United States’ addiction to debt, both at the national and personal level. Acquiring and using one may sink you deeper into debt, and any bank that issues a credit card relies on its users’ financial tardiness or illiteracy to generate exploitative interest on unpaid balances. There’s something fundamentally un-Apple-like about trying to profit from people’s weaknesses. Apple is conspiring with Goldman-Sachs to earn money by preying on the weak and indebted. I don’t like using this line, but there’s no chance in hell that Steve Jobs would’ve signed off on an Apple credit card, especially not one with such predatory interest rates. And the lock-in is already underway: Effective immediately, Apple Pay Cash in iOS 12.2 and watchOS 5.2 will not allow sending person to person funded by credit cards other than the Apple Card. Time is cyclical.

Apple had developed the iPhone in secret over those two and a half years, and for many inside the company, the device had only been known by the codenames “M68” and “Purple 2.” Apple was focused on surprising everyone with the iPhone, and that meant that many of the engineers working on the original handset didn’t even know what it would eventually look like. To achieve that level of secrecy, Apple created special prototype development boards that contained nearly all of the iPhone’s parts, spread out across a large circuit board. The Verge has obtained exclusive access to the original iPhone M68 prototype board from 2006/2007, thanks to Red M Sixty, a source that asked to remain anonymous. It’s the first time this board has been pictured publicly, and it provides a rare historical look at an important part of computing history, showing how Apple developed the original iPhone. Amazing exclusive, and a fascinating look at this rare development board.

There’s an interesting observation in this article that not enough people seem to realise: Probably one of the biggest contributors to Apple’s revenue is the massively popular App Store, which was estimated as of May 2018 to have seen upward of 170 billion downloads in its 10-year history. Most of those aren’t straight-up paid purchases — a massive percentage of the App Store’s revenue comes from in-app purchases in free-to-play games like Fortnite and Candy Crush and subscription apps like Netflix, Tinder, and YouTube. According to App Annie’s latest estimates, every single one of the 50 top grossing apps on the platform is either a major service that relies on subscription fees or a free-to-play game. Even the most popular paid apps like Minecraft or Facetune just don’t make the same kind of money as free apps that rely on in-app purchases, even with in-app purchases to help bolster their numbers. And Apple takes a cut of each of those in-app purchases and subscriptions. As Nilay Patel points out, Apple’s services narrative – the pitch to stockholders that Apple can grow its services revenue – feels rather unpleasant when you realise that most of the App Store revenue is microtransactions in free-to-play and gambling games like Candy Crush. It’s a rather dirty public secret Apple would rather you not focus on too much: Apple’s services revenue comes, in large part, from scummy apps and games trying to trick little kids and less technology savvy people into spending their money on gems or gambling boxes or whatever. Not exactly the kind of world-changing, holier-than-thou stuff Apple usually touts, now, is it? As Patel notes, this is a huge problem for Apple, as the recent Spotify antitrust complaint highlights: There is a clear disconnect between how much money Apple is making by charging a fee for users to take another turn in Candy Crush and how it wants people to think of the “app economy” — no one loves free-to-play games, but all the incentives of the store are aligned around them. So Spotify and Netflix saying the App Store tax is unfair causes a huge problem: if Apple changes the rules and allows alternate payment systems, it will crater App Store revenue because it’s all based on taking a cut of free-to-play games no one really wants to talk about. Tim Cook’s Apple is a bean counter company, a company with no qualms about giving up their Chinese users’ privacy, working closely with the totalitarian Chinese government, or profiting massively from scammy free-to-play games.

Ina Fried, for Axois, about Apple’s expected plan to move Macs to its own in-house ARM chips: Although the company has yet to say so publicly, developers and Intel officials have privately told Axios they expect such a move as soon as next year. I’m quite excited about this move. Apple has sway in the industry, and anything that lights a fire under Intel and the x86 archicture in general can only be seen as a good thing – more competition is always better.

Apple Inc. wants to make it easier for software coders to create tools, games and other applications for its main devices in one fell swoop – an overhaul designed to encourage app development and, ultimately, boost revenue. The ultimate goal of the multistep initiative, code-named “Marzipan,” is by 2021 to help developers build an app once and have it work on the iPhone, iPad and Mac computers, said people familiar with the effort. That should spur the creation of new software, increasing the utility of the company’s gadgets. This seems more of a repitition of what we already knew than truly new information.