Everything is a remix

A few years back, the filmmaker Kirby Ferguson created a compelling series of videos with the thought-provoking title Everything is a Remix. The core concept, to use Ferguson’s own words, is this:

Everything is a remix. Every song, every movie, every meme, every idea, every invention, every discovery. Everything we create is copied, transformed and combined from our culture.

And just like our creations are remixed from the world around us, our beliefs are remixed from what we watch, read and listen to. 

You can find everything about it at the project’s website.

After watching the Apple event from yesterday, my impression is that Everything is a Remix would have been a more fitting title than Hi, Speed.

The iPhone 12 design

Don’t get me wrong, I like the iPhone 12 design, the materials, the colours. That blue iPhone 12 mini is so very appealing. But as you can see from the image above, the iPhone 12 hardware design is a mix of the flat lines and chamfered edges of the iPhone 5 with the expanded screen, no-Home-button, intrusive notch front design introduced with the iPhone X.

It’s a remix. It’s not a bad one. The total is greater than the sum of its parts. But I’m starting to think that — at least for the moment — Apple is out of ideas and it’s reaching a ceiling with the design iteration. What’s left? An iPhone with a true ‘all-screen’ front and no visible notch. A foldable iPhone. What else? It’s a genuine question.

Let me anticipate your next objection: yes, the competition is hardly doing better in this regard. Motorola is trying to stay relevant by proposing a foldable phone that has the same name and a similar design language as one of their most successful feature phone models, the Razr. For the past several years, other Android manufacturers have been producing rectangular slabs that are rather hard to distinguish from one another (unless you’re a die-hard Android fan, maybe). If I had to pick the most daring company when it comes to phone design, I’d probably choose Nokia. Sure, they sometimes produced wacky, impractical designs, but one has to appreciate their desire to constantly try and break the mould when it comes to creating a form factor for a mobile phone.

This is possibly the first Apple event and product introduction where I truly felt the absence of Jonathan Ive. Sure, there’s a lot of him in the new iPhones, in the sense that they’re patchworks of a few of Ive’s ideas and designs. What I mean by feeling his absence is that, while I know there are hard-working teams of expert people who are capable of putting a new iPhone together, now I ask myself, Who designed this? Who’s the designer responsible for this concept and execution?

I think that, as counterintuitive as it may sound, a strong designer figure is more capable of solving new design challenges and is more capable of pushing the design envelope with new ideas and explorations, than the collective work of a ‘design committee’. In my experience, design committees tend to play safe and favour conservative solutions. Iteration versus creation. 

This committee approach in a post-Jobs, post-Forstall, post-Ive Apple has worked well at keeping the lights on and iterating on what, fundamentally, was already there, but I’m starting to wonder for how long this will continue to work.

HomePod mini

The ‘Everything is a Remix’ logic, once again. It is what it is, a smaller HomePod at a more affordable price. At the event and on Apple’s website it is presented with a colourful ‘mini’ word-art pulsating over it. Obviously, it’s reminiscent of the colourful iPod mini and iPod nano that came before, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the HomePod mini, too, comes in colours. But no, just plain old white and space grey. Its cute shape (it looks like a scented candle to me) and affordable price will probably make the mini a more successful product than its bigger sibling. It comes with a bunch of new, smart-home-oriented features, again revolving around Siri, the unintelligent assistant — and this, in my case, makes an already uninteresting product even more uninteresting. 

The emphasis on security made me smile, as I was gazing at my 35-year-old hi-fi stereo speakers, which may be bigger and wired and good at just one thing, but that’s me: I want a speaker to be good at just one thing. If you love wireless, smart speakers, if you love assistant-driven widgets you want to ask questions to, if you find the HomePod (mini or not) to be a truly useful device, more power to you. During the event, when Apple demoed the ‘intercom’ feature of the HomePod mini, I just chuckled.

What’s intercom? As Apple explains on the HomePod mini webpage, With more than one HomePod in the house, you can easily communicate with your family members by voice using Intercom. Ask Siri to send your message to the whole house or to individual rooms — and everyone can easily respond.

I just chuckled and quickly tweeted: Apple, not everyone has houses that big that you need to use the HomePod as intercom, LOL. But all jokes apart, think about the overall interaction: you have to get close to the HomePod, trigger Siri and tell it to relay the message. It’s already awkward by default, and the moment you need to add some urgency to your message, you just cannot expect a prompt reaction time from the rest of the people in your househo— I mean, mansion. Imagine how things could improve by implementing a ‘dumb’ solution, like, I don’t know, a dedicated Intercom button you push and talk directly into the speaker. But that’s not enough fancy AI, I guess. 

As a closing thought on the HomePod, sometimes I wonder why Apple seems hell-bent on doubling down on a ‘meh’ product like the HomePod, and unwilling to apply the same fixation on successful devices that only need a little improvement to keep up with today’s standards, like the AirPort line of wireless routers. It’s just personal preference, but I really feel Apple’s customers would be best served by having a good, updated, user-friendly line of AirPort base stations, rather than just another ‘smart’ wireless speaker.

Remix, vol. 3 — MagSafe

In what was the most unexpected part of the event for me, Apple has brought back a recently-killed technology, MagSafe. It’s basically a new line of iPhone accessories that revolves around magnets. Apart from the actual MagSafe charger and the MagSafe Duo charger, which to me is the most interesting accessory of all, the rest are less interesting magnet-equipped iPhone cases and wallets. 

Magnets are always cool, but calling the whole line of accessories ‘MagSafe’ is perhaps stretching things a little too much. But don’t mind me, I’m just a disgruntled Mac user who still can’t believe Apple removed this technology from Macs, where it’s sorely needed, to bring it to iPhones, which is more like a ‘nice to have’ feature.

But I’m hopeful. Who knows what Apple will decide to ‘remix’ with the next Apple Silicon Macs. At this point, anything is possible, and MagSafe may even return to the Mac.

5G

Apple’s emphasis on 5G throughout the event was rather strong. Still, Apple’s approach here seems the most reasonable: the new iPhones are all capable of handling 5G, but will typically stay on 4G and take advantage of 5G only when available. The problem, at least for now, is exactly availability. The implementation of 5G basically requires a whole new infrastructure, and that infrastructure is still in its infancy. And given that 5G’s technology is finicky and has its challenges (like being much more sensitive to obstacles, therefore making uniform coverage a more complicated affair than 4G and 3G), I believe this new infrastructure will need a more intrusive deployment. 

I certainly don’t believe the conspiracy theories surrounding 5G. While I can’t be 100% sure that 5G doesn’t pose some kind of health risk, I’m not a crazed alarmist either. But I’m wondering about the environmental impact that constructing a reliable, pervasive 5G infrastructure will entail. I’m also wondering if deploying such an infrastructure is ultimately worth it. I’m sure that, given the way technological progress works today, plenty of people will find a way to justify this enormous expenditure. The way many things in tech have progressed so far follows this logic:

1. There are too many cars running on these roads every day. Traffic jams are all too common: we need larger roads to accommodate more cars!
2. With the typical disruption that characterises these changes, larger roads are ultimately built.
3. Good, now that we have larger roads we can move around on bigger cars!

If this metaphor doesn’t stick with you, just think about the evolution (read: bloating) of software.

In his latest piece, Nick Heer writes:

As I have written for years now, the way 5G is being sold to the public is wildly disproportionate to the actual day-to-day impact it will have on most of us most of the time. At the moment, 5G is largely a useful buzzword for when you want billions of dollars in tax breaks, a shortcut for newspapers to seem more technologically advanced, and a way to eat up phone batteries at speeds slower than LTE.

But that surely does not have to be the case. One reason speeds are so slow right now is because faster 5G waves require users to be in closer proximity to cell towers and, so far, the infrastructure coverage is weaker than for LTE in the United States. But what if a company starts shipping a whole bunch of the most popular smartphone model in that country? That may spur a wave of adoption that effectively requires cell carriers to build out infrastructure more quickly. 

(By the way, check out this video by Michael Fisher: You Don’t Need A 5G Phone (Yet) where he tests 5G coverage in the field in Providence, Rhode Island, after his initial tests performed in Chicago. Both videos are from last year, but I don’t think the situation has noticeably improved yet.) 

Apple doesn’t seem to be very much concerned about the environmental impact of 5G deployment. They sleep well at night because they do their part at being environmentally friendly. Apparently as of late that also means not including earphones and chargers in the iPhone’s box, for instance. Which brings me to the last point of this article.

It just looks bad

Look, I understand the intent behind reducing the contents of the iPhone’s box. And while I tend to agree that wired earphones may be a redundant accessory in this day and age, the lack of a proper charger is harder to stomach. Yes, it’s true, long-time iPhone users may already have more than one charger at home from previous purchases, but what if they’ve passed their previous iPhones on to other members of the family or friends? It’s safe to assume they gave away the charger together with the phone. 

Then there’s what I already wrote in the Apple Watch section of my other piece commenting Apple’s September event:

If I want to gift an Apple Watch to a non-techie person, I’ll certainly err on the side of caution and will purchase a power adapter anyway. Also, you have no idea how many times I’ve heard this from non-techie folks and even from some moderately tech-savvy people: Hey, I can’t find my iPhone charger; can I use the one that came with my old iPod? Can I use the iPad’s adapter? etc. They’re not particularly fond of mixing-and-matching when it comes to chargers. I’m sure a fair amount of people will purchase the Watch’s power adapter separately anyway. 

As I’m sure a fair amount of people will purchase the new iPhones’ power adapter separately. Funny how Apple has removed earphones and power adapter from the iPhone’s box but not from the iPhone’s final price. The two accessories aren’t particularly pricey (€35 for the wired EarPods and €25 for the 20 W USB‑C power adapter), but if you need both, a new iPhone will cost you €60 more in my country. €80 more if you choose the new MagSafe wireless charger instead of the USB‑C power adapter.

The environmental impact here frankly sounds like an excuse while you overcharge those customers who do indeed need a power adapter. Apple considers itself a luxury brand offering premium products and services. A luxury treatment often includes complimentary items or, at least, gestures. Customers feel pampered even if they well know that that extra they’re given is already included in the price they paid. You go to a nice restaurant, have a full meal, and very likely the coffee or the shot of digestive liqueur at the end of the meal will be on the house. Sometimes they won’t even charge your second bottle of wine. Imagine going to a fancy restaurant and you have to pay to go to the toilet or to get an extra napkin. You wouldn’t feel pampered. You would feel like a fool who’s being taken advantage of. And that luxury establishment would just look bad.

I know this is pure fantasy, but imagine if, instead, you go to an Apple Store to buy a new iPhone. You decide the model, size, colour, and when everything’s ready and the employee brings you the box with your shiny new iPhone, they ask you, Will you need a power adapter with that, sir? You nod, and the employee puts one in your hand, free of charge. Wouldn’t you feel great even knowing that the price for that charger is included in what you just paid for your iPhone?

“You always complain…”

(Sigh)

Actually, I loved both Apple’s recent events and everything the company has introduced so far. The new Apple Watch models, the new iPad Air, and now this family of iPhone 12 models and MagSafe accessories. And even if the HomePod is definitely not the product for me, I recognise its merits. The new technologies packed inside the iPhone 12 (any model) are mind-boggling. Of course they are. They must be, in this fiercely competitive market. But I prefer to focus on what doesn’t convince me, or on what makes me wonder and ponder. 

There’s a difference between complaining like a contrarian does, and emphasising critically what doesn’t convince you. It’s like going to a magic show and seeing a great magician perform. Many are satisfied by the magic tricks themselves and enjoy the moment. Others enjoy the challenge of figuring out how the tricks may work and what lies behind, how to solve the puzzle, how to not fall for the magician’s masterful misdirection. I’ve willfully enjoyed Apple’s magic shows for years with barely a question; in recent years I’ve simply changed my focus.