Riccardo Mori

Notes on Apple’s “Hi, Speed” event

October 15, 2020

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

iPhone 5 + iPhone X = iPhone 12

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:

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!
With the typical disruption that characterises these changes, larger roads are ultimately built.
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.

This nine-year chasm

October 6, 2020

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Nine years ago today, Steve Jobs passed away. I don’t know about you, but I still feel the void he left behind.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you already know I’ve always preferred the way Jobs led Apple over the way Cook has been leading the company since he became CEO. This is entirely personal preferences’ territory, and I’m not asking you to agree with me or feel what I feel. This thinking-out-loud post you’re reading is just made of feelings and impressions, not of points to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about.

Apple is undeniably in great health today. When Steve left us, I remember reading a lot of drivel about Apple being irremediably doomed now that its charismatic, visionary founder had died. I never believed that for a second. I knew Apple was in good hands, because the team of executives was made of very capable people.

There’s no denying that Tim Cook has done a stellar job in keeping the huge Apple ship afloat. Whenever I discuss Cook’s Apple versus Jobs’s Apple, the common ground I find with people who disagree with me is that they’re both great Apples in different ways. And I genuinely believe that.

But… I don’t like Cook’s Apple.

Since I became an Apple user back in 1989, I’ve always felt there was more to it than just being a returning customer of a tech company. There was a sense of belonging to a common set of principles that went against the mainstream. That was extremely appealing for someone like me who always moved countercurrent to everything. There were the Mac user groups, places (whether physical or online) to share a passion with like-minded people. There was the idea of ‘thinking differently’ way before it was formalised in 1997 by Apple itself. Apple products weren’t just computers and peripherals, but specialised tools made for people with a creative, think-out-of-the-box mindset.

We Mac users were a minority, but we all had that tongue-in-cheek snobbism, like, We’re the cool guys, we’re the tech élite. But even in my years as an informal Apple evangelist, I never tricked anybody into leaving Windows and PCs behind and become Apple users because I was conditioned or because I was a thoughtless zealot who kept interfering with others’ work to the tune of “Get a Macintosh, you fool!” When someone asked me for technical advice, I first tried to help them out with whatever platform they were using. If I noticed that what they were trying to accomplish would have been better achieved by using a Macintosh, then I suggested it, explaining the different approach and the logic behind the Mac user interface, et cetera. If they decided to ‘switch’, then I would help them out in any way I could. Other fellow evangelists were less respectful. But I’m starting to digress.

When Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy in the mid-1990s, that sense of community grew even stronger. We Mac users were on this metaphorical Titanic, worried sick about the future of the company and our beloved machines, trying to stick together and help one another. The first emails I’ve ever written were about giving people advice on which Mac software and hardware to get (and where), to make the Macs they were currently using as future-proof as possible in case Apple went away. Looking back, those were really thrilling times.

But then Apple acquired NeXT, and shortly after Steve Jobs was back, and shortly after came the iMac, the iBook… even more thrilling times. And Jobs’s way of bringing Apple from almost-bankruptcy to exceptional success, the way he commandeered the ship and the way he led it from that moment on, truly reinforced that sense of belonging, that feeling of participation — as an Apple user — to that amazing Underdog’s tale.

Ever since Steve Jobs passed away, that something special of being an Apple user has quickly faded away. The thrill is gone. Cook’s Apple is an all-business money machine I feel less and less attached to. When Apple was at that intersection of technology and liberal arts Steve talked about, I was there. I recognised myself. Jobs’s Apple was a company that wasn’t made uniquely of tech-heads and led by business people, but a place where incredible design and masterful engineering met, a place led by a man who was eclectic enough to understand both fields intimately and get the product formulas right so very often. He put his soul in the products he envisaged. He put the fun element. He was the only one who could get away with using the word ‘magic’ in his presentations — because he gave meaning to it. He was the first to be amazed by the final product when he introduced it on stage. I’ve said it countless times, but there was a genuineness in Steve’s presentations that betrayed his underlying passion. And that passion was contagious.

Whenever he went a little off-script to talk about Apple’s values and Apple’s way of doing things, you knew he was all-in, you knew it wasn’t just empty, corporate talk you often hear when company executives harp on about their company’s ‘mission’. Steve’s legacy is a bunch of executives with contrived, unconvincing smiles, parroting phrases from the Good Book of Apple at every keynote and event. They go through the motions, they present their homework, and that’s it. Today, whenever I see a keynote segment end, I’m always left with the feeling that the presenter will immediately stop smiling as soon as they’re off camera, instead breathing a sigh of relief that their part is over. The show is over.

Despite those still bringing up Antennagate whenever you discuss Jobs’s style of leadership, Jobs’s Apple had more respect for its customers and developers than today’s Apple.

I’ve already brought this up in a 2016 post, but since I like my readers to stay on the page instead of constantly following external links, I’ll re-publish this entirely, because it bears repeating. In the last part of Jobs’s keynote at Macworld Expo in San Francisco in 2000 (a milestone, since it’s when Mac OS X was first introduced), before the ‘one more thing’ segment, Jobs took a moment to talk a bit about ‘The big picture’, and about what makes Apple, Apple:

I want to zoom out and talk about the big picture of how we see all of these things play together. You know, I remember two and a half years ago when I got back to Apple, there were people throwing spears saying “Apple is the last vertically integrated personal computer manufacturer, it should be broken up into a hardware company, a software company, what have you,” and— it’s true, that Apple is the last company in our industry that makes the whole widget, but what that also means [is that] if managed properly, it’s the last company in our industry that can take responsibility for customer experience. There’s nobody left!

And it also means that we don’t have to get ten companies in a room to agree on everything to innovate. We can decide ourselves to place our bets like we did for USB on the original iMac; hardware — let’s build it in; software — let’s build it in; marketing — let’s go evangelise it to the developers and tell our customers why it’s better. And let’s not wait three years for an agreement — and now Apple is leading in USB. Desktop movies — let’s take our hardware and put FireWire ports in iMac, let’s write applications called iMovie that take advantage of QuickTime and allow us to do these things, and let’s go market it, so people can understand this and see how easy it is to use. There’s no other company left in this industry that can bring innovation to the marketplace like Apple can.

So, we really care deeply about the hardware, we think this is where everything starts, and we got again the finest hardware lineup in Apple’s history. We’re so proud of these products. But we also do software at Apple. Again, we own the second-highest-volume operating system in the world and one of only two high-volume operating systems in the world. We make a lot of other software: Mac OS X coming, iMovie, et cetera. And the greatest thing is when we put them together, and we integrate them, like the examples I just gave you, like iMovie and the new iMacs, seamlessly integrated into desktop movies. Another example is AirPort, where we could seamlessly integrate this whole new wireless networking technology into our OS, so when you plug in an AirPort card in your iBook you don’t have to spend half an hour flipping settings. It just — boom! — pops to life and works.

This is the kind of innovation we can bring through this integration. And now we’re adding Internet stuff. We got our first four iTools today, that wouldn’t be possible if we couldn’t take unfair advantage of the fact that we supplied OS 9, the client operating system, and so that our servers and our clients could work together in a more intimate way than anyone else can do. And so we’re gonna integrate these things together in ways that no one else in this industry can do, to provide a seamless user experience where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And we’re the last guys left in this industry that can do it. And that’s what we’re about.

These are words from someone who wants to build something that is better for everybody involved — and he fucking means it. And this is also the core of a certain culture which, unfortunately, has been crumbling at and around Apple since he passed away. A culture where customers feel they’re respected and taken care of, where developers feel motivated, inspired, and incentivised to play their part in this big picture. Just read Jesper’s recent piece titled Home to better understand what I’m talking about.

Jobs and his Apple cared for the products but also the whole experience surrounding them. They had to be superior products not because they simply exude a ‘premium feel’ and superficial prettiness. But because what drives them — the software, the user interface — is as essential to the whole experience as the hardware. Today, does Apple still “take responsibility for customer experience”? Does Apple provide today a “seamless user experience where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”? I don’t feel that. The user experience is not seamless, and the whole is a sleek clash of all of its parts. If Apple cared about customer experience, they wouldn’t have taken four years to rectify the disaster that was the MacBook keyboard’s butterfly mechanism.

Today’s Apple is business first, engineering second, design third. It’s led by someone who has no charisma or vision. Hey, nothing wrong with that, but a smart move would be to keep those who possess both such traits close to yourself instead of pushing them away (people like Jonathan Ive and Scott Forstall, for example). Today’s Apple is ‘team effort’. It’s a very well maintained entity by many capable maintainers who have perfected the art of iterating, at least as far as hardware is concerned. But where are the architects?

Software-wise, especially when it comes to Mac OS, I don’t see any. Those who are in software design seem to have forgotten how to make a great operating system with a well-crafted, thoughtful user interface. I don’t feel a strong direction here; just repeated attempts and a visible trial-and-error approach. And I totally share John Gruber’s concern when he writes:

My biggest question and deepest concern regarding Apple’s leadership, especially now that Ive is gone and Phil Schiller has moved on to a fellowship with only the App Store and events on his plate, is whose taste is driving product development? We know the actors, we know the writers, we know the cinematographers, but who is directing? Who is saying “This isn’t good enough” — or in the words of Apple’s former director, “This is shit”? When a product decision comes down to this or that, who is making that call?

As I’ve repeatedly stated in my observations about Big Sur now that I’ve been testing the betas since August, the next version of Mac OS shines when it comes to performance, responsiveness, and stability — that’s my experience, at least — but when we examine the look and feel of its user interface, it mostly feels directionless. Where is the purpose? Why these changes? Is it to make the interface more usable? Is it to make that interaction work better or to make that element just look sleeker? It’s often hard to see the intention or even the logic behind some of them. The background colour of the System Preferences pane has subtly changed at least three times in the course of five betas. Things you used to make with one click, now take two or more clicks, just because someone at Apple felt like touching up a certain part of the interface for no apparent reason other than ‘trying something different’ or ‘fixing a previous, equally arbitrary cosmetic change’.

Today’s Apple is led by an expert in supply chain management. And that’s how Apple treats their developers — like cogs in the supply chain. And customers? The goal with customers seems to be to maximise the lock-in. From the Catalina issues mail folder with all the feedback I’ve received over the past months, I could extrapolate hundreds of stories of customers who are still using Apple products not because “There’s nothing better, man” or because “Apple gets me, so of course I’m using Mac” — responses I used to hear all the time back in the old days — but because “Eh, today Apple’s the lesser evil”, or “I’m too deep in Apple’s ecosystem to even begin thinking about alternatives”, or “If it weren’t for [app x] that’s my favourite tool for [task y], I would have switched to Windows already”.

Now, before the keyboard warriors start sending me hate mail, let me reiterate a point I made earlier. I recognise and acknowledge all the good products and the good initiatives and the positive stances that are coming from Apple today. I still use plenty of Apple products and I still trust Apple more than other tech companies especially due to the importance Apple is giving to privacy. And…

(let me copy & paste this bit from the beginning of this piece)

…There’s no denying that Tim Cook has done a stellar job in keeping the huge Apple ship afloat. Whenever I discuss Cook’s Apple versus Jobs’s Apple, the common ground I find with people who disagree with me is that they’re both great Apples in different ways. And I genuinely believe that.

But… I don’t like Cook’s Apple.

The void Steve Jobs left behind nine years ago is not limited to Apple, but extends to the whole tech industry. Things today are okay — there is still the occasional product or innovation that enthuses me, of course. For certain aspects I find Microsoft — Microsoft! — to be a more daring and interesting player. But without the colourful, rebellious spot that was Jobs’s Apple, the current technology landscape feels desaturated and mostly ‘corporate’, if you feel what I feel.

Technology alone is not enough, the man said. But in this sort of post-apocalyptic tech landscape, technology seems to be all that’s left.

Steve Jobs at WWDC 2006

Mac OS Big Sur logbook (8) - Subtle UI changes

September 28, 2020

by Riccardo Mori

Software

These past days I’ve received a few snide comments via email, from people who were wondering if I had maybe lost interest in keeping up with this logbook. Absolutely not. The simple truth is that everything was working fine on my 13-inch MacBook Pro and there was nothing really worth mentioning. My daily job also kept me busy. And a couple of days ago I also realised that — while I saw people on Twitter talking about Big Sur Beta 7 — my system was still on Beta 6 and Software Update kept telling me that my Mac was up-to-date. Last night I decided to check again, and what do you know, Software Update informed me that Beta 8 was available, a 3.61 GB download.

As with past betas, right after downloading, and before starting installation, the Mac enters this stage, and it usually reaches very high temperatures; this time the peak was 98°C.

Preparing Big Sur B8

Side note: I had heard that the Early 2015 MacBook Pros had a higher threshold for fan activation compared with the 2013 and 2014 models. I couldn’t believe that with temperatures over 90°C, fans were spinning at only 1800rpm. Anyway, thankfully that didn’t last long and the Mac didn’t melt.

The update went well, and after restarting I began exploring the system looking for changes.

Subtle changes in the UI

Now, bear in mind that some (maybe even all) of the visual changes I mention here may have been introduced in Beta 7. But, as I said above, for some reason Software Update never notified me about Beta 7; so for me these changes have appeared in Beta 8. Apologies in advance if I’m late in pointing them out.

The first welcome change is that now the system menu bar is less transparent than before. I still maintain that this important user interface element should never be made transparent or translucent, for usability reasons; but still, this is a small step in the right direction:

Menu bar transparency in previous betas

Menu bar transparency as of Beta 8 (or Beta 7?)

While we’re on the subject of the menu bar, there’s something else I’ve noticed: how Big Sur handles Dark Mode is bizarre. Now, I still haven’t upgraded my main Macs to Mojave, and I’ve used Catalina for so little time, so maybe this is how Dark Mode has always been implemented — but I highly doubt it.

In short: if you switch to Dark Mode (System Preferences → General → Appearance → Dark), but you keep a light Desktop background, the menu bar will remain light:

Dark Mode and light background
Note however how iStat Menus (a third-party app) correctly detects Dark Mode and switches its menu bar elements to white.

To get the ‘full Dark Mode experience’, you also have to choose a dark Desktop background:

Dark Mode and dark background

And finally, as you may have already guessed, if you choose Light Mode, but you keep a dark Desktop background, the menu bar will remain dark enough that the menu names and other first-party menu bar elements will stay white. Third-party elements, however, stay black because they detect that the Appearance is Light, not Dark:

Light Mode and dark background

This is, of course, a silly mess. The crux of the matter is that the behaviour of the menu bar isn’t tied to the system appearance (Light or Dark), but to the shade of the Desktop background. You might say, Well, if you prefer to switch to Dark Mode, you’re also likely to favour a dark background, and that’s mostly true, but still, you may have set your Desktop background to change at specific intervals, and there may be the occasional lighter image that, when triggered, turns your menu bar to light while every other UI element remains dark. It’s distracting, and frankly it also makes little sense. The appearance of the menu bar and Dock should be tied to the system-wide appearance. If I want Dark Mode, these two main UI elements ought to stay dark no matter what happens with the Desktop background.

Finder windows

Looking at Finder windows, I can see a few changes, but I don’t seem to fully understand the intentions behind them. Here’s a Finder window as it appeared in Beta 6 and as it appears now in Beta 8:

Finder window B6
A Finder window in Beta 6

Finder window B8
A Finder window in Beta 8

1. The Title bar/Toolbar area is now white instead of light grey. This change looks just arbitrary (spoiler: all these changes look arbitrary).

2. The View selector is now a pull-down menu. The only pro brought by this change is that is saves space on the toolbar. It’s really a poor solution prompted by the unnecessary, purely-æsthetic choice of increasing the spacing between items everywhere in the system. As for usability, it’s another faux pas, since now you have to perform an additional click every time you want to switch views in a Finder window. Yes, it’s irritating.

3. The line spacing for the elements in the sidebar has been increased. For better legibility, perhaps? I think it was absolutely fine before. This is a space — especially the Favourites section — that tends to get crowded quickly as users add their most accessed folders, and the increased line spacing makes it look good only when there are just a few items as in the images above. On my main Mac, I have nineteen items there. This means that on the 13-inch MacBook Pro I’d have to keep all windows as tall as the screen to be able to see all such items without scrolling. The increased line spacing is another waste of space.

4. The Path Bar is now white instead of light grey. Another arbitrary change that serves no apparent purpose.

Now that the Title bar of the active window is all white, when you look at a stack of windows, the inactive windows at first glance look more active than the one in the foreground. And look, I know these are stupidly fine details, but shouldn’t it be more logical that objects in the background had more faded colours than the ones in the foreground?

Active and inactive windows B8

A quick look at Safari

Safari’s chrome appears slightly darker, and when it comes to its Preferences pane, they seem to have slightly improved contrast — the icons for the various sections are darker — and the text, pull-down menus, and buttons appear slightly rearranged. Apart from the improved contrast in the icons at the top, I find that Beta 6 looks better than Beta 8 here. Have a look.

My general impression regarding Big Sur remains unchanged for now. From a performance standpoint, and after almost two months of use, I don’t have complaints. On this 2015 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, the Big Sur betas I’ve tried (Beta 5 to 8) all behaved very well and felt decidedly stable. The MacBook feels very responsive and seems to perform better than under Catalina.

From a user interface standpoint, instead, Big Sur still feels very much a work in progress — in some places perhaps even a work in regress. It’s increasingly hard to understand certain design choices, and it all really feels like a trial-and-error process but in a very random way; like when you really want to rearrange the furniture in your house because you want the rooms to look and feel ‘fresh’, but you haven’t taken into account that if you move the bookcase to the other wall it’s going to bump into the door when you open it; or that if you move the television over there, the sunlight coming through the window will create an annoying glare on the screen and you’ll have to draw the curtains every time you want to watch something; and so on and so forth, you get the idea.

In short, I don’t see a strong, cohesive structure behind Big Sur’s visual design; just the urge to make Mac OS look more like iOS. It’s still an ill-fitting suit, though.

Previous logbook entries

Brief notes on Apple’s “Time Flies” event

September 16, 2020

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Like other people, I do think these audience-less Apple events are very well filmed and produced. At the same time, they inadvertently enhance a feeling I’ve increasingly felt about Apple under Cook’s direction. Apple feels like a company that is simultaneously close to their users, and detached from them. On the one hand, you see those emotional stories about how Apple Watch can help and take care of people. On the other hand you have Apple Park’s eerily empty spaces, making the place feel completely isolated, even artificial. And you have the lives represented in Apple’s product videos — these perfectly clean cool-looking people living good, orderly lives, blissfully immersed in Apple’s ecosystem.

I know, if you take product videos from other tech companies, they very often share this same ‘sterilised mood’, but in Apple’s case the contrast hits more noticeably given their insistence on presenting themselves as a company that’s intimately close to their users, caring about their privacy, manufacturing devices that “improve and enrich people’s lives”, and so on. Perhaps I’m just rambling here, but what I kept feeling as the event unfolded is that Apple both gets and doesn’t get their customers; that Apple’s genuineness is part real, part façade. For better or for worse, there was a honesty and candidness in Jobs’s Apple that I don’t feel at all with this Apple. Apple’s smile feels like the smile a banker wears when you say you want to open an account there.

Apple Watch

Apple Watch is a fantastic device I don’t particularly care about. I am fully aware of what it can do, and I realise how useful and important its health features are. It’s not for me simply because it does too much. And it does more and more at every iteration. During the event, I tweeted that With this level of feature creep, the Watch Series 10 will basically replace an iPhone. And I was only half joking.

I still use a Pebble as a smartwatch. It’s simple. Its interface is straightforward and discoverable. It does the basic three things I want in a smartwatch: tracking my steps (and sleep), and forwarding selected notifications I receive on my phone. And I can have a lot of fun trying out dozens of custom watchfaces.

About the Watch outer design, again, I said on Twitter what I think: I know that you shouldn’t fix what is not broken, and I’m not necessarily saying I don’t like it, but the Watch design is essentially the same as five years ago. You look at the Watch Series 6, the Watch SE, and the Watch Series 3, and they’re virtually indistinguishable.

I understand the move of keeping the Series 3 in production, but it’s a hassle for developers, and it’s even starting to feel too entry-level even for budget-conscious customers.

I also understand the idea of not including a power adapter with the Watch, but I still have doubts about its effectiveness in reducing the impact on the environment. The reasoning is, You very likely already own a power adapter, it’s wasteful to put one in the Watch’s box. 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.

Apple One

If you’re really invested in Apple’s services, this is a win-win situation. If you, like me, are not, you won’t care.

But one thing I’ll keep saying until I’m blue in the face: the iCloud 5 GB free storage tier is ridiculous and completely anachronistic.

The new iPads

If I’m not mistaken, the new eight-generation iPad is essentially the seventh-generation iPad with a newer CPU. The A12 Bionic chip, while not the latest and greatest, will provide enough performance to make this iPad a very good-value device for all those casual users who aren’t particularly interested in the ‘Pro’ features. Apple is raising the bar so much when it comes to the iPad, that even the humble iPad 8 doesn’t really feel like an entry-level device.

Having said that, there’s one detail that keeps bugging me. The base iPad 8 model still has 32 GB of storage space. Given what you can do with an iPad today, this is starting to feel like when Apple shipped the 8 GB iPhone 4S and iPhone 5C. 32 GB felt right back in 2012 when I got my third-generation iPad, but today I think 64 GB should be a more suitable minimum storage size.

The new iPad Air is really, really nice. I am surprised by the whole updated package: it feels very close to the current 11-inch iPad Pro. In its design, in the display size, in its features (that Touch ID sensor in the power button is indeed a nice touch, and something no other iPad currently has). The new colour variants are very cool, and I’m partial to Sky Blue.

Admittedly, the first thought I had after the iPad Air introduction was: If these are now the specs of a middling iPad, I wonder what they’re going to do with the next iPad Pros.

Finally, as someone who is about to get a newer iPad at last, I’m mulling over what to do. The new iPad Air is very attractive, but in my country the base 64 GB model is 649 euros, and for the way I typically use my iPad it’s simply too much. Last month I was considering buying the 128 GB iPad 7, but now the 128 GB iPad 8 has a better processor and performance at the same price (479 euros here). However, this is the time when stores are going to put the remainder of their inventory on sale and make offers and discounts. If past years are an indicator, for me it might have sense to purchase last year’s iPad 7, and I would definitely consider last year’s iPad Air 3 if their discounted price is good enough.

Mac OS Big Sur logbook (7) - Dialog boxes

September 8, 2020

by Riccardo Mori

Software

While using the beta of Big Sur on my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, I have occasionally encountered some dialog boxes, especially modal dialogs, whose redesign feels rather unpolished. It heavily borrows from iOS, and here’s the thing I don’t get…

Mail dialog box

…Why are they in portrait orientation?

I can understand such a design on an iPhone, since its display is in portrait orientation. On a Mac, this looks a bit strange. And those buttons, just piled on top of one another, with the same width and comparatively small space between them, don’t strike me as an elegant way of presenting choices.

Their layout is also inconsistent. This is the warning you get when you try opening an app coming from an ‘unverified developer’:

Open app warning 1
Buttons are side by side

And this is the similar warning you get when you tell Mac OS to open the application anyway by right-clicking on its icon and choosing Open from the contextual menu:

Open app warning 2
Buttons are one above the other

This second dialog box, as you can see, has an additional problem: the text block is longer than the space afforded. It looks truncated, but actually you can read it in its entirety by hovering over it with the mouse and scrolling down. Something that’s not at all apparent at first glance, by the way. A small scrollbar will appear next to the text on mouseover, but a clearer hint would be welcome. Sure, a verbose warning isn’t pretty no matter the dialog box design, and verbose warnings don’t happen that often, but this particular tall-and-narrow dialog box design makes the modal dialog look even busier.

Just for comparison’s sake, here are the same warnings on High Sierra. The dialog boxes are better designed and more balanced:

Open app warning 1 on High Sierra
Open app warning 2 on High Sierra

Another inconsistency is that sometimes — like in previous Mac OS versions — one of the buttons will be highlighted (see the first dialog above, from Mail), other times all buttons are grey.

Historically, in the Mac OS user interface, most (if not all) modal dialogs have had an option highlighted, and its corresponding button preselected. Usually, the reason behind the highlighting was to provide a quick way to select either the most obvious choice, or the safest choice. And of course, for warnings where you don’t have a choice and you just acknowledge them, the OK button would always be preselected.

I presume the no-highlighted-choices in these dialog boxes in Big Sur are just temporary. By the way, I’m not arguing they’re wrong per se. Perhaps sometimes there isn’t an obvious choice or a suggested choice to highlight, therefore the user can’t just dismiss a dialog by pressing Enter — they have to actively read the dialog’s contents and respond accordingly by purposefully clicking on one of the buttons. Like maybe in this case:

Reminders permission

Yet another inconsistency is that dialogs like this one essentially retain the old design:

Restart dialog

So, what’s it going to be? An entirely new visual design, or a mash-up of old and new?

Sheets

As defined in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, a sheet is “a modal dialog that’s attached to a particular window — usually a document — and prevents further interaction with the window until the sheet is dismissed.”

It seems that in Big Sur, as far as I’ve noticed, sheets are getting visually detached from their corresponding window, and take the form of standalone dialog boxes, but further interaction with their corresponding window is nonetheless prevented by greying out that window which is now put in the background. I’m still undecided whether this is an improvement or not.

This is a confirmation sheet in High Sierra’s Mail app:
Mail dialog box full (High Sierra)
And this is the Big Sur equivalent:

This is a confirmation sheet in High Sierra’s TextEdit:

Textedit confirmation (High Sierra)

And this is the Big Sur equivalent:

Textedit confirmation

What I like about the old design is that it emphasises the bond between the sheet and the application it belongs to. The animation, too, is unequivocal: the sheet comes out of the window like a sheet of paper comes out of a printer. In the new design, the sheet becomes a sort of dialog box linked to a window, and I guess that, with a Desktop crowded with application windows, that window behind the dialog box, so evidently darkened and in the background, may help make the whole interaction stand out more by attracting attention on itself.

It has happened to me more than once: I’m bouncing between two or three open apps, I quickly press the keyboard shortcut to close a window or a tab, but instead I’m inadvertently telling TextEdit (or another writing app) to close the document. I keep switching between apps wondering why App 1 hasn’t registered my action, while TextEdit has produced that same confirmation sheet you see above, and it gets lost in the mess of white application windows on my Desktop. With Big Sur’s design change, I’d probably notice it sooner.

On the other hand, just from the two examples I posted above, you can see how this new sheet design still hasn’t been fully formalised. In Mail the dialog has this new, strange portrait-oriented look; it’s a slightly lighter grey than the background window, and it doesn’t really stand out as it should. While in the TextEdit example the dialog box is white, stands out more, and retains the older arrangement of all of its elements. Needless to say, I much prefer this latter look and feel.

I don’t know when Apple plans to ship the official release of Big Sur, but we’re already a week into September, and even if Big Sur is scheduled to be released in late October, time’s getting tight. I have the feeling the user interface polishing is going to still be a work in progress for at least a few minor releases.