Apple Archive

It's on github.

It's almost as if carefully orchestrated press events attended by nothing but employees and hand-picked, pre-approved press outlets, as well as fake renders on a company website, are not a good way to gauge a new product.

With the Apple Watch' launch upon us, it's become a bit of a thing to drudge up old internet comments from back when the iPhone was released, and act all smug about how random internet commenters were wrong. Just for fun, I decided to go back into our own extensive archives, and take a look at what we at OSNews had to say when the iPhone was released.

The actual post covering the keynote contains no judgement calls, but a few hours later, Eugenia posted a lengthy analysis of the then-new device. She concluded:

While Apple (and more so in their specific case, Android) did eventually displace Nokia and Motorola, her conclusion seems pretty spot on - worldwide, Apple holds about 15% of the smartphone market, and that's more, more, more than enough for the company to be crazy super unimaginably successful. And, of course, smartphones are (or have) taken over from feature phones.

I had to dig pretty deep into the comments on the first few iPhone articles to try and find my own analysis - and I came up short. I did stumble upon a few comments from me complaining about the lack of tactile feedback and not being able to operate a touchscreen device without looking at it, and I still stand by those - coming from Palm OS and PocketPC, I knew just how cumbersome using a touch device is while, I don't know, on a bike, because you have to look at them to use them. This bothers me to this day, and it's one of the reasons I'm so excited about Apple's Force Touch technology.

In any case, we also ran a review of the first iPhone, written by OSNews' publisher David Adams. His conclusion:

With the power of hindsight, this seems pretty spot-on, too.

All this being said, it'll be interesting to see what's going to happen with the Apple Watch. One prediction I'm reasonably sure of: it will be a successful product in the countries where Apple's iPhone is doing well - the UK and Ireland, North America, Japan, Australia, and China. Different people will have different perceptions of the word "successful", but we can be reasonable sure that in its first year, the Apple Watch will sell in the millions in these countries alone (I would guess 15-20 million).

Outside of these countries, it will be a much harder sell, for reasons we all understand - you need an iPhone for the Apple Watch, so in countries with fewer iPhones, the Apple Watch won't be a big deal at all. Of course, there's always the possibility of the Apple Watch converting non-iOS users to iOS, but I don't think that number will be very substantial.

The big hurdle to overcome for the Apple Watch is the same hurdle that seems to plague both the Pebble and Android Wear, as well as other wearables: the drawer. It seems many wearables take only a few weeks to end up in the proverbial drawer once the user forgets to charge it one night, doesn't put it on, eventually putting it away in a drawer. If the Apple Watch can overcome this problem, it could be a hit. I don't think it will ever achieve iPhone or iPad status, but it will continue to bring in a steady stream of money.

A fluff piece, but still an interesting read about the origins of the Apple Watch. Two parts stand out to me. First:

This makes zero sense to me. If your phone is indeed ruining your life, how is adding another tiny, finnicky screen on your wrist going to help? All it does is add another step between seeing a notification and acting upon it. Instead of staring at just your phone's screen, you'll be staring at both your phone's and your watch's screen. The watch will invariably suck for acting upon notifications (tiny screen, low battery, voice recognition will fail), forcing you to take out your much more usable phone anyway... At which point you might as well take care of everything while on your phone. You'll be back at square one.

There are still interesting use cases for a smartwatch, but saving you from notification overload is not one of them.

Second:

From the very beginning, I said that the Apple Watch looked a lot like a tiny iPhone strapped to your wrist - unlike Android Wear, which was designed from the ground-up for the wrist (not to a lot of success, might I add, but still). The fact that the Apple Watch literally started out as an iPhone strapped to your wrist is telling, and explains why the device seems to be so convoluted and complex.

Apple has a far better track record making stuff people want, so there's a considerable chance this is exactly what people want, but not once while using my Moto 360 I thought to myself "if only this thing was even more complicated and convoluted, than I would not want to ditch this thing in a drawer!".

If there is just one article you read this month, let it be this one. Do not skip this.

Exactly what you expect. Great story.

It seems the Apple Pay fraud is a bit more complex than it just being the banks' fault. This is what happens when one company becomes so big and dominant that everyone else dances to their tunes. We've seen it before in technology, and it seems we are entirely unwilling to learn.

In any case, letting a secretive, closed technology company take care of my payments seems like an incredibly stupid thing to do. I much prefer our banks to handle it - they're shady, too, of course, but at least here in The Netherlands, there are at least a lot of government and media eyes focussed on them, and they have far stricter laws and regulations to adhere to than a random technology company.

Interestingly enough, this is the same director behind the praised documentary about the criminal organisation 'scientology'. Moreover, Apple has actually deemed it worthy enough to attack the documentary, claiming it is "inaccurate and mean-spirited".

A more glowing endorsement has never existed, I would say.

Apple held its Apple Watch event today, but despite all the hype, the two most exciting announcements had nothing to do with the Apple Watch. I want to start the announcement that excited me the most, even though the general public won't care all that much: ResearchKit. ResearchKit combines the iPhone and HealthKit to allow iPhone owners to participate in medical research.

This may sound like something trivial, but anyone who has ever done any serious scientific research - medical or otherwise - knows how hard it is to find enough quality participants. ResearchKit will allow users to opt-in into medical research programs, so you can collect data through your iPhone and send it straight to researchers. They can then use this data to aid in research for conditions like diabetes or breast cancer.

In addition - and this is hugely important - Apple announced that it will release ResearchKit as open source, so that other platforms can participate in this endeavour too. In other words, Android or Windows Phone users could install applications to aid medical research as well, assuming developers implement support for it. I'm really hoping the big players - Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. - come together to make sure this is a proper open standard, implemented on all the major smartphone platforms.

Cancer has had a huge impact on my life - even though I - thank the goddess - have never had cancer, I've had people close to me and my family die all around me ever since I can remember. I've seen families torn apart by it, I've seen people fight through it to live another day (like my mother), and I've seen people suffer horrendous pain. In fact, I'm sure we all have.

However, I've also seen what medical research has done for those suffering from cancer. Even a few years can make a huge difference - breast cancer treatment today is better than it was only a few years ago. And of course, while my personal frame of reference is cancer, there are countless other horrible diseases that could benefit greatly from more and easier research participation.

So yes, this was, at least for me, as a human being who cares about the people around him, the most significant and most important part of today's event. I'm setting my cynical self aside for a second, and I'm really hoping the industry gets behind this as quickly as possible. Please.

That being said, on to new products. Apple announced a new MacBook that's crazy thin, has a fancy new keyboard, and a nice new touchpad. It's only 0.92kg, 13.1mm thick, and has a 12" 2304x1440 display, and comes in silver, blackish-silver and gold. The specifications are a bit disappointing, though: a 1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core M with Intel HD Graphics 5300. It's got 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD (configurable to 512GB). Best thing: it's completely fanless.

The keyboard replaces the scissor mechanism with a butterfly one, which sounds like marketing nonsense, but actually makes sense. Whereas scissor hinges causes keys to wobble upon keypress, the butterfly gine has a more uniform keypress. I'll have to try it out to see if it translates into actual benefit, but it sure does look like it. Similarly, the touchpad has been redone as well, and now implements Apple's confusing force touch stuff from the Apple Watch. I think a force touch is a harder press, but I still have no clue.

All in all, this looks like a fantastic, if not underpowered laptop - until you hit the price. The price is very hefty - $1549 in the US, and €1449 in the EU. No thanks.

Lastly, we have the Apple Watch. Apple essentially just redid the demo from late last year, showing very little new information or functionality. Basically, take any Android Wear device, add the ability to answer calls on the device itself, make the software more complicated and the UI uglier and messier, add several hundreds of dollars or euros to the price, and you've got yourself an Apple Watch. In other words, dangerously close to that Tizen Samsung Gear thing nobody wanted.

Apple had one job this evening: tell us why we want an Apple Watch. Tell us why we should spend at least $349/€399 (the price of the small version of the cheapest model), all the way up to €17000 (the most expensive gold model) for a gadget so we have to take our phone out of our pockets slightly less often. The cold and harsh truth is that Apple failed to answer that question - what they showed us was a very complicated, finnicky device with an incredibly hefty price tag (only the garish aluminium/rubber small models are $349/€399 - the better-looking models are all around €900-€1000).

You don't have to believe me - take it from The Verge's Nilay Patel, not exactly a vocal Apple critic, who actually tried the device out after the event.

The device is riddled with unintuitive and arbitrary UI conventions, and just as I predicted when the device was first announced, Patel states it feels disjointed and confusing. This is by no means a surprise to me, but it is a surprise for a first-gen Apple product. The iPod, the first iPhone, the iPad - they were all quite intuitive and easy to grasp, but the Watch, clearly, seems not to be so.

This is a matter of taste, of course, but the applications Apple showed didn't look particularly nice, either. Words like garish, information overload, cramped come to mind. Android Wear is already confusing and cumbersome at times due to the small screen, and Apple is cramming a lot more functionality and user interface in that same space. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that's not going to be easy to use. All in all, nor this event, nor the first hands-on reports seem to allay my initial concerns about the confusing and cumbersome UI.

Apple promises "all-day" battery life of 18 hours, which is less than what I get out of my Moto 360 (two days easy, three days with effort), and more or less forces daily charging. It'll be available in select countries starting in April.

They're at it again.

This comes straight from an antivirus peddler - the people who spread lies and FUD non-stop to scare unsuspecting users into buying their useless, crappy, resource-hogging bloated software. For every person here on OSNews who see through these companies' lies, there's a dozen regular users falling for their scams.

Now, it's iOS' turn apparently. I will continue to hammer on this issue until the cows come home. Whether you're using iOS or Android, you do not need antivirus software.

Between all the pointless bickering, we sometimes forget how much technology can mean to people when facing hardship like this.

This always seemed like such a no-brainer to me. In fact, I'm surprised this kind of 'tethering' functionality isn't built into iOS+OS X themselves by Apple.

Hopefully this will help address the many iOS bugs people are currently complaining about endlessly.

I bought an old iBook G3/500 (it'll arrive tomorrow) because I've always wanted an Mac OS 9 laptop (I've had several desktop OS 9 machines over the years). This article is a nice starting point for those (oh so very few) of us who want to run OS 9 in today's world.