Riccardo Mori

Taking a step back to see better

January 31, 2024

Back in my university days, I used to haunt several bars and cafés near the university buildings with a few mates, students of literature and philosophy. We would typically choose a place to have lunch there at first, but often we ended up staying there all afternoon if we didn’t have other classes to attend. We would order more tea or coffee, study, compare notes, and so on. But the best part, the unforgettable part was the conversations. It’s that stage of your life where you feel you can make an impact on the world, where you feel you’re really understanding how the world works and you feel your intellectual ramblings can redefine entire aspects of society. You’re the generation ‘in charge’, you’re the thinker. Et cetera.

We loved to dissect theories, poetry, literary criticism, language, semantics, people’s behaviour… It was abstract at times, but also pragmatic and rooted in the here and now. During one of these conversations, I remember trying to link habits and interests. Or rather, trying to find a way to differentiate between interests mixed with passion, and interests tainted by habit. Don’t ask me why I had this urge. Perhaps my interlocutor was talking about interests and hobbies in a way I found too generic and shallow. I recall making drawings on a small Moleskine notebook, and talking about vectors. The interests+passion label had a big arrow pointing up, i.e. forward. The interests+habit label, instead, had an arrow on a circle, a loop.

And I know, it’s weird I still remember parts of this conversation so many years later, but my university days had a huge impact on my life, and so many details have remained with eerie vividness in my memory.

Anyway, at some point during that conversation, I said: Beware of loops. Loops kill you. With loops you don’t go anywhere. If you start feeling a loop, step back and try to refocus.

“You mean routines. You mean the routine,” said my interlocutor.

But some routines are just part of life, I responded. My parents’ work schedule is rather fixed. It sorts of creates routines for them. They have to go to work at these hours, so they need to organise their day this way, go to bed at a certain hour, wake up at a certain hour, and so forth. The loops I’m talking about are sort of a thing of our own creation. They’re more similar to bad habits, little addictions with little voices we love to hear the sound of… Am I making sense?

With hindsight, I think I was trying to push some variant of the concept of echo chamber. Now, when you look up the definition of echo chamber (I’m using the Dictionary app on my Mac for convenience), it says:

an enclosed space where sound reverberates.

an environment in which a person encounters only beliefs or opinions that coincide with their own, so that their existing views are reinforced and alternative ideas are not considered.

What I was trying to convey when talking about loops, if I remember well, was something in between these two meanings, the literal and sociologic one. Something like an environment in which a person becomes so involved and enveloped in their interests and reverberations of such interests, that they lose sight of the actual importance of such interests and simultaneously of the actual influence these interests have on their worldview. That’s why I was talking about bad habits and little addictions.

This long-winded introduction serves to explain the eureka moment I had a few days ago. When it happened, I immediately felt myself inside the core of that constant feeling of tech fatigue I’ve been experiencing for the past couple of years at least.

My interest in technology over time has been slowly but steadily transforming into such a loop. I was getting more and more frustrated because I kept feeling the effects of this process, without being able to pinpoint the cause. I had to step back and try to refocus. Only I didn’t step back consciously. I sort of found myself distanced from the whole thing like two magnets rejecting each other. Tech fatigue acted like a rejecting force getting stronger with time.

I am now in a phase where I’m renegotiating the importance of technology after the sobering realisation of the influence it has been having over my life for the past 30+ years, but especially in the past five years or so. If I’m sounding like those people who left a cult and feel that only now they can really talk about the cult because they finally see it for what it is, that’s because yeah, in part it feels the same.

There are other interests that can become loops and trap yourself into them, like a tornado vacuuming everything it encounters on its path. Another example might be photography when all you do is obsess over gear, spend an unhealthy amount of time in online forums (maybe engaging in foolish battles over what’s the best mirrorless camera or what’s the perfect focal length for street photography), spend an inordinate amount of time watching photography-related videos on YouTube, ingest so much ‘latest news’ and articles on the topic, and so forth. You end up completely absorbed in the ‘photography world’ and perhaps feel good in the process… except that now you spend 90% of the time in that ‘photography world’ loop, and 10% actually taking photos. Whenever you take a genuine interest or hobby and nerdify the heck out of it, you lose yourself in its reverberations (remember that revised definition of echo chamber above) and become consumed by it.

Don’t get me wrong, the pursuit of knowledge is a good thing. I’ve been intellectually curious my whole life. I love learning something new every day. What constantly pushes my curiosity is the idea that the more I know, the more I understand the world around me. But the way information flows today, the direction Internet and social media have taken today, it all points towards hyperspecialisation and obsessive-compulsive inflation of interests and hobbies. You become an expert in, say, military aircraft, and can recite all the specifications, background and development of the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25, yet you have no idea where Hungary is, or what Newton theorised in 1684, or how to spell certain words in your own language. I’m making silly examples, perhaps, but the point is, you lack a healthy general knowledge background.

Back to technology. The tech world today is particularly insidious because it’s become more than just an interest for many people. Given the way it has taken over in many aspects of our lives, it’s almost impossible to avoid its gravitational pull. It’s also almost impossible to prevent it from becoming a loop. The tech world is especially good at producing reverberations of its own shit. What tech companies and tech ‘celebrities’ do and say, the breakneck pace of tech news, the veritable oceans of digital ink produced daily to talk about such news, to comment on them, to comment on others’ comments on them… In Christopher Nolan’s 2010 masterpiece Inception, Cobb, the protagonist, is a skilled information extractor using the technique of entering the dream state and picking up valuable data and secrets from the target’s subconscious. During the film, we see a lot of this dream state. So many sequences that, if you were to stumble on the film halfway into it, you would believe were really happening and you would believe the characters are acting in the real world, and not in a shared dream reality. Sometimes the world of technology today feels like this. Some dimension that not only absorbs you and your time, but also alters your worldview and the way you think. And not always for the best.

I truly appreciated this article by Eric Schwarz back in November 2023 — or a ‘venting session’ as he calls it — and I hate that I’ve been so slow in acknowledging it here (I’ll probably address the reasons behind this latest hiatus in another post).

Eric’s piece is aptly titled, When It’s Not Fun Anymore, and if I had to describe what it’s about in short, I’d say it’s Eric’s analysis of what has accumulated over the past few years to make him feel ‘tech fatigued’. It’s hard to quote from it, because it’s all quote-worthy. So many things resonated with me:

I think being an enthusiast about technology by default makes one an optimist […]

Instead, we’ve sort of gotten into this dystopian, late-stage capitalism doom loop [Oh look, that word again. — RM]. There’s idiotic billionaires acting like they’re the saviors of society through vanity projects, rather than the useful work of actual philanthropists of the past. There’s sometimes the assumption that anyone interested in tech wants to be like that. Every company is focused on “maximizing shareholder value” to the point that any joy and humanity is squeezed out of products. There’s no respect for users when it comes to privacy and being good stewards of our data — I had that hell with trying to delete accounts with some companies. In short, the monetization people won out and sometimes it feels like there’s no room for art or care.

I’m tired of everything seeming to get worse and more expensive, followed by patronizing emails explaining that this is better for me. For some businesses, the argument is “you can save money by using our app,” yet it wants access to every aspect of my phone. I’m sorry, but fast food doesn’t ever need to access my contacts or photo albums. In the past, I’ve been passionate about streaming services, as it seemed to be the dream of à la carte TV and mixed two things that I’m heavily interested in: tech and media. Instead of focusing on quality and content, it was a race-to-the-bottom to get subscribers, a proliferation of generic garbage (I’m looking at you Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery), and then price hikes and more price hikes. Ad-free tiers only exist to sort of tease us, while the money to be made is in ad-supported content. While I haven’t entirely unsubscribed en masse, it hurts to see the direction things are going in.

In terms of privacy, it’s frustrating how everything is becoming an inkjet printer or smart TV—a device that is a more tech-infused version of something we already know, yet the manufacturer can make it creepy and subscription-based. […]

Beyond that, we’ve gotten into a routine of buzzwords being the only driver of technology. I’m the last person to hate on new ideas, but we’ve had instance after instance of a solution looking for a problem and it’s just tiring. Cryptocurrency is terrible for the environment and proponents seem to think it can replace money when way too many retailers still haven’t moved on from magstripe card readers. NFTs seem like a way for influencers to drum up business. Artificial intelligence has some utility, but it’s exhausting to hear every company try to cram it into their sales pitch—I sat through a sales pitch for PCs at my day job and the manufacturer was trying to sell their bloatware as AI that will make my job easier.

I apologise for quoting 80% of the article, but Eric really and succinctly sums up so many things that are just plain wrong with tech today. You wonder why we’re letting so much of this happen. My take is that many people are lost in the tech loop, lost in its reverberations, living the shared dream state of tech, jacked up in the Matrix thinking it’s the real world. Don’t think I’m passing judgment from my high horse here. Don’t think I’m being Neo or Morpheus (if we have to keep referencing the Matrix). Or rather, I am like Neo at his most confused phase in the first film of the franchise.

If you start looking at the tech sphere this way, the increasing loss of common sense in online discourse begins to make sense. I still remember the absurd back-and-forth with a guy in a forum, where he was going on and on about how amazing it was to control all lights in his house from an app on his smartphone, and how cool it was that his smart fridge was keeping track of his calorie intake. (No, really, you can’t make this shit up.) What do you do when the light app drops support for your phone model? What do you do when the startup making the smart light solution files for bankruptcy and shuts everything down? What happens when your fridge breaks or loses the connection to the Internet? were some of my genuine, down-to-earth, objections. He thought I was the crazy one. And anyway his solutions to those potential issues were essentially to waste more money to keep those ‘smart’ solutions alive. If the light app drops support for his phone, well, apparently he will buy a newer phone. Let that sink in. Then ask yourself who’s the crazy one here.

Again, I’m doing my best not to sound pretentious or holier-than-thou, but I’ve come to a point where I think more and more people need to wake up, take a step back, and refocus. This is not the kind of ‘tech detox’ I did in the past for some periods of time, and it’s not the usual Oh god I feel so overwhelmed by my tech news feed lately, I need to take a break kind of detox either. It’s more like distancing myself from technology’s constant siren song to distinguish between what’s healthy knowledge and what’s just the product of the reverberations of the tech loop.

At this point it’s fair to ask, So, what do you suggest one should do to distance themselves from tech in a good way? But I really don’t have satisfactory answers to that. I haven’t entered this extremely critical and distrustful phase towards the tech world by following a recipe or a method I sat down and devised myself. I just went progressively out of sync and out of tech’s orbit. Life coincidentally got in the way, too, by demanding a lot of my time elsewhere doing other stuff (work & worries, mostly, but not only that). So, less time to read my tech RSS feeds, very little time to watch tech YouTube, very little time to read tech news. At first I missed all of that quite badly. Now I distinctly feel that 90% of that was not really necessary — and I was already extremely selective of what I read and watched.

Of course technology is not something you just ‘leave behind’. And it’s not the kind of advice I’m implying here. When you’re looking at a map and you realise you’re too zoomed in, what you do is zoom out and still look at the map to have a better idea of the bigger picture, literally. You don’t close the Google Maps tab in your browser or your Apple/Google Maps app on your device and swear you won’t look at another map in your life from now on. So many things in technology are advancing and permeating society because so many people are led to believe (by the loop! It’s always the loop!) that such things are good and totally harmless and have no side effects and it’s all ‘progress’. Being tech-illiterate today is not wise and is the first step towards being taken advantage of. This renegotiating phase I’m currently in is rather chaotic, and it’s difficult for me to give meaningful suggestions. I’ll share a small portion of an email I wrote to François, a reader of this site, back in May 2023 in response to an email he wrote me asking about “ways to balance the need to stay reasonably up-to-date with breaking changes and that to put enough distance between yourself and The News™ to stay creative and productive.”

This was part of my response:

If I had to summarise, I think I’d say it’s a bit like when you’re on a diet. You remove many foods that — while tasty and somewhat addictive — aren’t ultimately nutritious and, worse, are bad for your health. What I’ve been realising over time with the tech world is that there is a lot of, um, ‘tasty and somewhat addictive’ noise filling the space and making the signal harder to distinguish and pick up. So I constantly try to filter out all the noise and focus on what I think it’s the meatier stuff.

One thing that helps is that I usually rely on selected trusted sources to stay reasonably up-to-date, so I don’t have to waste time reading a dozen different reviews or watching a dozen different videos about a product. There are exceptions, of course, especially when something potentially controversial appears. But at that point it’s clear that the matter requires more attention, and if it seems worthwhile to pay that more attention, then I’ll play along. Otherwise my attitude is more like “Yeah, okay, got it. Next!”

This, in retrospect, makes me realise I was already on the right path, but that was probably not good enough all the same. To stay within the metaphor, I thought I was doing great with my ‘diet’, but I’ve come to realise I haven’t lost that much weight, really.

Recently I’ve skimmed through a few blog articles talking about being optimistic about tech today, and I increasingly find fewer and fewer reasons to be so. There’s this overwhelming, nagging feeling that an increasing amount of things are getting out of hand, that greed is spreading from the top in so many aspects of technology, and too few people at the bottom are actually ‘voting with their wallet’, so their acts of protest are irrelevant in the grand scheme. Many are stupefied by the usual tide of latest-and-greatest gadgets. Many just shrug and don’t care, volunteering so much personal information and ‘productifying’ themselves in exchange for a small convenience in their daily lives. Being optimistic about tech ultimately means being optimistic about people and their will to jack themselves out of this Matrix.

Good luck with that, my sceptic voice quips, as Apple is about to launch Vision Pro, designed to further draw you in.

A few thoughts about Humane’s Ai Pin

December 8, 2023

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

As I was gathering some notes for this piece and reading other people’s takes, I found myself in a very similar position as Jesper’s.

His article begins as follows:

The Humane Ai Pin has been announced, a phone alternative trying its best to not be a phone in any way. Humane famously spearheaded by ex-Apple luminaries Imran Chaudhri (with large amounts of the iPhone and multi-touch user experience to his name), Bethany Bongiorno (a Director of Software Engineering from the launch of the original iPad) and counting among its ranks Ken Kocienda (part of the initial Safari/WebKit team and designer of the first software keyboard and typing autocorrect), I’m finding myself wondering what I’m missing.

There are a lot of people in Humane’s personnel who have an impressive background in understanding user interfaces and human-machine interaction. There are a few aspects of the Ai Pin I find fairly interesting, and I think they nailed both the hardware design of the device, and its wearability. I also think that the concept of the Pin, in its most abstract sense, is pretty intriguing. I’ve always believed that technology and machines should serve people and adapt to their needs, instead of the other way round. So, when at the beginning Humane vaguely hinted at working on something following this philosophy, my interest was piqued. I think smartphones have done a lot of good to society, but also a lot of harm when it comes to the interpersonal sphere. And whenever I’ve had the time to be at my most contemplative, I’ve often thought about what is the next step beyond smartphones. That’s why I was very interested in Humane’s intents and projects. Again, these people are not amateurs at all. Let’s hear them out.

When mentions of this upcoming device being fully ‘AI’-powered started to appear, my interest started waning a little. But wait — I said to myself — perhaps Humane has found an innovative way to make ‘AI’ work. Some kind of left-field implementation. Who knows.

Then the Ai Pin was announced and demoed. And my reaction was just like that famously memetic GIF of the Star Trek character Jean-Luc Picard, with his resigned, frustrated facepalm.

For me, the most ironic aspect of what doesn’t work with the Ai Pin is that it underwhelms in the two main departments I least expected it to underwhelm: user interface and human-machine interaction.

I know nothing about the thought process the people at Humane went through to bring forward the idea of the Pin, but I suspect that a lot of analysis about how people use and interact with smartphones was involved. They must have asked themselves, What can we do to go beyond this? — What do we feel is wrong with the way people interact with their phones, and what can we do to improve things? — What kind of human-device interaction can make things smoother and frictionless but also make the relationship less device-centric, less addictive? — You know, questions like these. It’s rather clear to me that they wanted to come up with a device that could be out of the way as much as possible but also be as useful in assisting users so that they would not miss using a smartphone.

This intent, this design, is worthy of praise. This is difficult territory. I know well all the little things that annoy me about smartphones, the way they’re used, the way I use mine, and I’m sure everyone has their peeves. But if someone asked me point-blank what kind of device or interface or interaction I would create to solve the issue, to make things better, less tech-addictive and more human-focused, I wouldn’t know what to say.

If I were given more time, I’d probably try to start with something people would familiarise with in no time and interact with in ways that are even easier and more intuitive than taking out a smartphone and fiddling with it. Maybe this, too, was something Humane considered in their brainstorming sessions. And maybe the Ai Pin is what they consider a good answer to such proposition.

But from what I’ve seen in the demonstrations showing how to use the Ai Pin, this device doesn’t seem all that intuitive and easy to pick up, and it doesn’t seem to be more frictionless than using a smartphone. It also faces the basically insurmountable challenge of winning over people who have accumulated years of smartphone-centric habits. But even I — who am terrible at marketing and predicting technology trends — understand that people only change their habits if the reward is receiving more comfort and convenience. The Ai Pin brings awkwardness in every sense of the term, and little else.

Oversimplifying, the Ai Pin is like having a Siri‑, Alexa‑, or Google Assistant-powered smart home device always with you. You wear it. The main form of interaction is you asking it to do things for you or to retrieve information you need. You have to talk to it. There is no really tangible interface. Any visual interaction may happen with a UI that is laser-projected on the palm of your hand. While you’re reading this, do this quick thought-experiment and ask yourselves, Would I seek to purchase such a device solely based on this description? Would I ditch my iPhone or Android phone for such a device? Yeah, I thought as much.

Ever since Siri was introduced in 2011, I talked about how fundamentally sceptical I am regarding voice-only interaction with this type of virtual assistants. (It’s hard to find short quotes, but you should go back and read Siri’s fuzziness and friction from 2015 and more importantly A few stray observations on voice assistants from 2018).

They’re essentially black boxes, which is a real problem when it comes to feedback. Can I just talk to them in plain language? Do I need to use some kind of formulaic pattern so that my requests have a higher chance to be recognised and acted upon? Does the Assistant understand concatenated questions? (You ask question 1. Assistant responds. You ask question 2 based on the Assistant’s response to question 1. Is the Assistant still ‘following’ you or has it reset?) How does the Assistant handle ambiguity in language and speech?
This can lead to friction in the interaction, and I suppose things are not that different from what happens with Siri already (which has been happening since Siri appeared): like I wrote in Siri’s fuzziness and friction, “Siri is the kind of interface where, when everything works, there’s a complete lack of friction. But when it does not work, the amount of friction involved rapidly increases[…]”
Another by-product of being black boxes is their reliability. Both regarding how they handle communication failures, and regarding how reliable, i.e. trustworthy, is the information they relay. In these products’ demo videos everything happens flawlessly. In real life, virtual assistants misunderstand you more often than not. Like my dad had suggested in the conversation I reported in my afore-linked piece A few stray observations on voice assistants, “Reliability must be put first with these assistants. They ought to understand you at once, and if they don’t, they ought to allow you to correct them as quickly as possible. Otherwise they’re just like that subordinate at the office who is supposed to help you do the work, but he doesn’t understand or misunderstands what you want him to do, and you end up doing more work to fix the misunderstandings.”
The Ai Pin requires a lot of trust on the part of the user. The user must be comfortable wearing a device which essentially constantly monitors its surroundings. And, as hinted above, the user has to trust any response coming from the Pin. Showing that you can hold some almonds and ask the Pin whether you can eat them or not is a cool interaction. But should we trust its response to be factual and correct? Some have already pointed out that in a few usage examples of the Ai Pin made by Humane, the Pin gave incorrect responses, which isn’t exactly trust-building.

Before this list grows and grows, let’s stop for a moment and focus on what I consider the fundamental point of failure of this device (and other similarly-working assistants): people don’t like and don’t want to interact with devices via voice commands and voice-based interaction. They just don’t. There are exceptions at the extremes of the spectrum, like spoiled tech bros on one side, and people with disabilities on the other. But the vast majority of regular people find this kind of interaction awkward, fatiguing, uncomfortable (especially in public) and ultimately inefficient. For the past ten years or so I have accumulated a fair amount of data through personal observation but also through repeated surveys targeting different demographics in the part of the world where I live, and the results have never changed. Only a negligible sample of people use these virtual assistants with some frequency. The vast majority still prefers doing things themselves: setting timers, choosing and changing music, looking for places to eat, checking their schedule, finding the shortest route to their destination. In other words, they like to be and feel in control, they find that taking out their smartphone or tablet and checking things themselves is way quicker than asking stuff to a virtual assistant the right way so that they can extract a meaningful response, and they really really don’t like talking out loud to an inanimate object.

I was talking with a friend recently about this subject, and during our chat another important aspect of this kind of voice-based interaction came to light — and it further explains why a lot of people find it fatiguing. It’s information retention on the part of the user. In the Ai Pin showcase page on Humane’s website, the Catch me up feature is presented like this: Simply say “Catch me up,” and your Ai Pin does all the work of sifting your texts and calls to give you the essence of what you need to know — and saving you precious time for what’s important. The response may vary according to how busy you are and what’s going on at the moment in your life, but I suppose that when you prompt the Pin this way, you’ll still receive a fair amount of information. How much of it will you actually remember?

I don’t think I’m alone in preferring to go through my stuff myself, using a device where the information is presented clearly and can be interacted with easily and directly, and take note of what’s important. It may take longer, but I end up retaining more information in the process. It’s a more satisfying experience. Perhaps I may miss something, but given the black box nature of these devices, how sure can you be that they have caught everything there was to catch?

The Ai Pin makes the same conceptual mistake behind all the assistants that preceded it: to treat all people as if they were so utterly helpless and clueless to manage even basic stuff. And to grossly miscalculate which tasks people find tedious and willing to delegate to a machine. These assistants want to assist with stuff people have no problem doing themselves, and they do so through an interaction model that ultimately makes things more awkward, impractical, and longer to accomplish. (On the other hand, it’s a good interaction model for people who have different types of motoric or visual disabilities and need assistance when sending and receiving messages, collecting information, etc.).

Perhaps it’s too early to say, but I strongly feel a certain similarity between the Ai Pin and Google Glass. Like I previously noted in A few stray observations on voice assistants:

It has been pointed out how Google Glass has turned out to be a failed attempt as a general-purpose device aimed at the general public, but a more successful one in limited, specialised applications and environments. I believe voice assistants have started with the wrong foot […] I think that if voice assistants had been originally designed having people with disabilities as first and sole target audience (instead of lazy tech dudes), and then gradually extended to everyone else, today they’d be a bit better.

And:

[T]here’s a big difference when your goal is to develop a tool that makes your life-as-an-able-bodied-person easier (read: spoiled) instead of a tool that makes the life of a disabled person more tolerable. Your able-bodied person’s ‘friction’ is bullshit compared to the real friction of a person with any disability. A useful virtual assistant is one that, first and foremost, addresses a few crucial types of impairments. Design with that in mind, give precedence to solving problems related to the interaction between a person with impairments, develop against those, test against those, then worry about perfectly healthy twenty-somethings who are too inconvenienced to manually select the music they want to play.

Instead there’s this urge to create The Next Big Thing that will be a hit for everyone, everywhere. And to create it in one fell swoop, skipping all the steps that might help you really get there.

And this insistence on treating ‘AI’ (in quotes, because artificial intelligence doesn’t exist) as a panacea for everything is as misguided as it is tiring. In wanting to feed these hungry ‘AI’ Black Boxes with all kind of data, and especially personal, sensitive data, we are quickly and surely creating that Big Brother George Orwell warned us about in his novel 1984. A novel that, I feel, is more cited than actually read and understood.

At the end of the day, like my friend and I were saying in our chat, what comes after the smartphone has to be something that it’s better, more pleasant to use, easier to interact with, more efficient in use, and providing an even more fulfilling experience. A device like the Ai Pin doesn’t fit this description, at least in its current state.

Back to his piece, Jesper wonders:

The Humane Ai Pin didn’t happen by chance and was not lazily extracted from between the couch cushions. A lot of talented people spent a lot of time at it, clearly chasing a deep vision.

So why does it seem so terribly, undeniably off?

My theory — and it’s just that, a theory — is that this final product isn’t exactly the embodiment of Humane’s original idea. That’s what feels off to me, for the most part. I may be completely wrong about this, but the more I look at it, the more I feel that Humane had a much more ambitious concept in the design phase than essentially putting Alexa in an iPod shuffle, but the technology they would have had to put inside it was perhaps still out of reach, or it would have been so expensive to implement and deploy that they would need to give the final product a price tag so ridiculous nobody would buy it. At $700, the Ai Pin is already a hard sell as it is.

A long-overdue status update

November 26, 2023

by Riccardo Mori

Briefly

I realise that lately the silence here must have felt deafening for a fair amount of my loyal readers. My apologies. This time, things behind the scenes have also been more problematic due to an issue I had with the email account tied to this website, which I extensively use to respond to any feedback related to my articles.

The issue turned out to be simple in nature, but since the system was failing silently, it took me a while before realising what was going on, and an additional little while to troubleshoot and resolve matters. The consequences have been a bit disastrous, though. Essentially, if you wrote me an email between mid-October and mid-November 2023, I couldn’t access it before 20 November or so, and it’s now part of a pretty sizeable email backlog I’m trying to go through in my spare time.

In other words, if you’ve written me in the past month and a half (or even longer in some cases), I haven’t been ignoring you — I just couldn’t see your message immediately; I have seen it now, and I will try to get back to you. I want to especially apologise to Vladimir Prelovac, whom I still owe some feedback about the Orion browser (which is still my main browser on Mac along with Vivaldi), and to Maciej W., who wrote me a long and thoughtful email talking about the subject of my previous article on Apple’s DNA and Europe’s DMA.

I normally don’t write status updates and “sorry for not having posted anything in a while” blog posts. Years ago I used to publish more stuff more frequently here, trying to keep up with the frantic pace of technology. It didn’t take long to realise that it wasn’t feasible. Especially when my daily job became more demanding of my time and attention. In recent years, tech has also become a rather weary subject to follow, debate, talk about. Essentially, my stance is that I publish an article when I have something to say. When I don’t have anything useful to say or add to a discussion, I just don’t write and I also don’t like to pepper this place with short-form things like quick links or brief quotes with one-line commentary. I use Mastodon (and X/Twitter, but less and less frequently) for that.

But in this case I made an exception because among the emails that are now queued in this big backlog I’ve seen subjects like, “Are you okay?”, “Everything good?”, “You’re not dead, are you?”, and so on. These are clearly people who only follow my blog and don’t follow me on social media, otherwise they would know I’m okay. So, given this level of concern — thank you, everyone, it really means a lot — I wanted to write an update and reassure you all. I’m fine. Lately I’m just busier than the usual level of busy, and alternately fatigued and annoyed by technology. I’m also a lot behind my RSS feed reading, and when this happens, one frustrating consequence is that by the time I can write something in reaction to a certain piece of news or commentary, the debate (and inevitably the interest) around it has already died down.

Anyway, I hope this status update has been useful and helped clearing things up about what’s been going on behind the scenes. I’m currently writing a new piece, which I hope to publish here shortly. Thank you all again for your concern and for your messages of support. It’s always greatly appreciated.

Apple’s DNA and Europe’s DMA

October 4, 2023

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

I praised a few video essays by Jon Prosser in the past, and I respect the guy, but while his latest This is the END of Apple may have a ‘hit’ title and premise, I feel it’s actually a ‘miss’. A fair warning and admission: I’ve only watched the first 10 minutes of this 14-minute video, then I got so irritated that I had to close the browser tab. But I think it was enough to understand Prosser’s argument, and in any case what I’m going to talk about here is based on what I watched, so I don’t think I’m jumping to conclusions. But do let me know if I missed something crucial.

Prosser’s video first points out how the appearance of USB‑C in iPhones is remarkable because for the first time in Apple’s history, it’s not exactly there because Apple chose to go this route, but it was a decision heavily influenced by EU legislation and its Digital Markets Act. Prosser theorises that this turning point — Apple’s compliance with government legislation — may very well be the beginning of the end for Apple. Because now that the EU Commission has successfully forced Apple’s hand, like the story of the mouse and the cookie, the EU will want more, the EU will require Apple to make changes to their products in ways that go against Apple’s own direction, and ultimately against Apple’s DNA. This is what Prosser calls ‘the end of Apple’.

Prosser:

A week or so ago, a chief of EU industry, Thierry Breton, publicly called on Tim Cook to open up the iPhone’s walled garden ecosystem of hardware and software to… rivals. In a quote, Thierry said, The next job for Apple and other Big Tech, under the DMA (Digital Markets Act) is to open up its gates to competitors. Be it the electronic wallet, browsers or app stores, consumers using an Apple iPhone should be able to benefit from competitive services by a range of providers.

This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable request for most companies, and it can be hard to pinpoint where the problem lies exactly for iPhone users, for Apple fans in general. But let’s really look at what this means. Under this new DMA law, Apple’s major platforms like the App Store, Safari, and iOS as a whole were officially classified as ‘gatekeepers’ [Note: To be precise, the Wikipedia entry for the Digital Markets Act states that “Twenty-two services across six companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft — were named as ‘gatekeepers’ by the EU in September 2023.”] and as a solution Apple is expected to add support for the sideloading of apps from outside the App Store on iPhones and iPads. Apple’s argument for their walled garden approach has always been user security and privacy. Obviously the lack of competition in their own platform is another huge positive, and our guy Thierry was quick to respond to that argument too. In a quote, he said, EU regulation fosters innovation, without compromising on security and privacy. And in a very ‘Apple’ move, [Apple] haven’t responded to this comment. But I will: this is fucked up!

Here Prosser inserts a Steve Jobs quote taken from the interview at the All Things Digital D8 Conference in 2010 with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher:

We’re just people running this company. We’re trying to make great products for people, and so we have at least the courage of our convictions to say, “We don’t think this is part of what makes a great product, we’re gonna leave it out”. Some people are going to not like that, they’re going to call us names, it’s not going to be in certain companies’ vested interests that we do that, but we’re going to take the heat. Because we want to make the best product in the world for customers, and we’re going to instead focus our energy on these technologies which we think are in their ascendancy and we think are going to be the right technologies for customers. And you know what? They’re paying us to make those choices! That’s what a lot of customers pay us to do, to try to make the best products we can, and if we succeed they’ll buy them. And if we don’t, they won’t.

Then Prosser comments:

This opening of Apple’s ecosystem is not pro-consumer. This is not something consumers — Apple’s iPhone users specifically — are asking for. This is just anti-Apple, and it’s kind of gross.

So much to unpack here. I’ll start from the very last paragraph quoted above, and loudly call bullshit.

This opening of Apple’s ecosystem is very much pro-consumer, and very much anti-fanboy. I sympathise a lot with that Steve Jobs’s quote, and every time I see excerpts from his attendances at the various ‘D’ Conferences I get nostalgic and start missing the man badly. But we have to put that quote in context. And the context is the year 2010, thirteen years ago, when the newest phone was the iPhone 4, the latest iOS version was iOS 4, the first iPad had just been introduced, the iOS App Store was two years old, and iCloud didn’t exist yet. An era when Apple’s ecosystem was rather strong in general, but not as stifling as it would become in the following thirteen years.

I’ve been writing online about tech since late 2004 (if you don’t count my participation in forums and mailing lists, which started circa 2000), and I’ve launched this website in 2011. Since morrick.me started getting some traction circa 2014, I have lost count of the number of emails I have received from people, Apple users, utterly frustrated by the progressively walled-garden structure of Apple’s mobile ecosystem. Even back when the iPhone 3G was introduced, and it finally became widely available here in Europe as well, I had clients and friends who were puzzled by certain aspects of ‘Apple’s way of doing things’. Bluetooth file transfer between phones was one. An acquaintance at the time pointed out how easy it was for them to just send any file via Bluetooth from a Nokia (or any other brand) dumb phone to another phone, with just a few clicks. Try that with an iPhone to any other phone, or even between iPhones. There was no AirDrop back then. The quickest way was sending the file via email, or maybe uploading it somewhere and sharing the download link. Or using some kind of third-party solution, but both iPhones had to have the same third-party app installed, and so forth.

When Jobs says, That’s what a lot of customers pay us to do, to try to make the best products we can, and if we succeed they’ll buy them. And if we don’t, they won’t. — That’s not as clear-cut as it perhaps was in 2010. Recently, in a feedback email I received, one of my readers was sharing his exasperation about feeling irrevocably locked into Apple’s ecosystem:

I’ve seen a lot of interesting Android devices in the past 2–3 years or so. I like what certain brands like Google and Samsung and Nothing are doing with the design. iPhones feel stale in comparison. And Android, I’ve tried the latest version on a borrowed Google Pixel. I like it. When you remove all the crap and the bloatware, it’s pleasant, and certain quality apps don’t feel that much different from their iOS counterparts. I also think this Pixel takes better photos than my iPhone 13.

But I can’t just switch to Android and leave the iPhone behind. Why? Because friends and family all have iPhones. Because chats means using iMessage. Video calls means FaceTime. Photo sharing, file sharing means iCloud. Convenience should mean using whatever the hell solution you want to seamlessly connect with others. Not, let’s just all lock ourselves in the same ecosystem and use the tools that are graciously bestowed on us by our overlords.

And before you ask, no, I can’t afford to dual-wield an iPhone and an Android phone. I’m also not saying it’s impossible for me to just switch. I’d probably find a workaround for many situations where the 2 platforms [iOS and Android] diverge. But it’s exhausting, and you know, also ridiculous if you stop and think about it. It’s 2023, there should be more interoperability and fewer ivory towers, you know? These constraints look more and more stupid and artificial.

And this is by no means the only message I’ve received with this kind of complaint or frustration.

Sideloading

To avoid becoming too long-winded, I’ll point you to my article On sideloading from November 2021. My position on the matter hasn’t changed since then (it never changed, by the way).

Painting sideloading as this serious threat against Apple’s ecosystem or even DNA is really just parroting Apple’s stance and just accepting a closed and proprietary system as the best and most consumer-friendly solution. It is neither. It’s simply the easiest solution to implement, the easiest to maintain, and the one that potentially brings more money through user lock-in.

Apple likes to use privacy and security as a way to justify the walled-garden approach of its mobile ecosystem. I don’t doubt that a locked-down system (like current Macs’ hardware and some parts of Mac OS) or a locked-down platform (like iOS on iPhones and iPads) is inherently more secure than a system or platform where users have complete freedom of movement and choice. But the flipside is, well, that as a consequence, users do not have complete freedom of movement and choice. So they cannot replace a Mac’s internal SSD or expand a Mac’s RAM if they want more down the road, because it’s all soldered and impenetrable. You have to go through Apple, probably spending double or triple what you would spend by sourcing the parts yourself and replacing them yourself or having them replaced in a repair shop.

And if someone creates a wonderful Commodore or Nintendo simulator to play classic games on your iOS device, and Apple rejects the app citing some App Store rule, you won’t be able to enjoy such app, full stop. If someone creates an iOS utility that truly takes advantage of certain iPhone/iPad features, but in a way Apple considers too ‘close to the metal’ or too competitive with what they’re already offering in the operating system, Apple will reject this utility. Not because it’s ‘dangerous’ or ‘malware’, but because it interferes with their agenda in some way. And we should believe that Apple has the customer’s best interests at heart? Sideloading may open the doors to frauds, scams, and malware, but also to many potential great apps that are currently rejected for some bizarre App Store rule, technicality, or interference with Apple’s internal plans. And by the way, the current state of all App Stores is not really secure for customers either, since a plethora of scammy apps are discovered practically every day. As I wrote back in 2021:

[Back when the App Store was first introduced] Instead of teaching users how to fish, Apple decided to position themselves as sole purveyors of the best selection of fish. Now, leave aside for a moment all the tech-oriented observations you could make here. Just stop and think about how arrogant and patronising this attitude is. Sure, I can believe the genuine concerns of providing users with the smoothest experience and protecting them from badly-written apps (or just straight malware) that could compromise the stability of their devices. But by not taking a more moderate approach (it’s either we lock down the platform or we’ll have the cyber equivalent of the Wild West!), you also deprive users of choice and responsibility.

The problem of appointing yourself as the sole guardian and gatekeeper of the software that should or should not reach your users is that you’re expected to be infallible, and rightly so. Especially if you are a tech giant which supposedly has enough money and resources to do such a splendid job that is virtually indistinguishable from infallibility. Instead we know well just how many untrustworthy and scammy apps have been and are plaguing the App Store, and how inconsistent and unpredictable the App Review process generally is.

The EU is not the enemy

It’s worrying to me that Prosser and so many technophiles (especially from the US) prefer to side with Apple and Big Tech and frame this whole matter as government/legislation versus tech companies/innovation — the typical us-versus-them mentality — as if these were two irreconcilable entities. In a world where tech companies are dictating and controlling (directly or indirectly) so many aspects of our lives, seeing a governmental body and legislation — whose purpose is to really care about people’s best interests — as the enemy is just misguided. According to many of these nerds, tech companies should be given free rein to do whatever they please, because otherwise innovation would not happen; and we should give them free rein also because they said they want what’s best for their customers and we of course must believe this narrative, because tech companies are typically sincere and altruistic in their pursuits. Shareholders, fiscal quarter results, money and capitalism are just minor, tertiary factors we shouldn’t really look too much into — Right?

You know what’s gross and fucked up, Prosser? Siding with Big Tech today, instead of understanding that maybe a bit of legislation and compliance is necessary to protect customers from being treated like sheep with wallets, or reduced as products.

The typical retort, If they don’t like the status quo, customers can vote with their wallet, is just ridiculous and out of touch with many realities. Platform lock-in is a serious issue, and many people can’t just buy an Android phone or a Linux laptop on a whim or in protest. Sometimes migrating platforms involves many months or even years of transition, especially if your business has always gravitated around Apple solutions. Sometimes you can’t even migrate to a platform while leaving the other entirely behind, because your clients need compatible, cross-platform solutions. And on a personal level, like with the feedback email I quoted before, what keeps you locked into a platform is peer pressure, or the increased friction you would experience by switching. Mind you, increased friction that is artificially created by tech companies to keep you locked in. Friction that tech companies, if they truly wanted to enhance people’s lives, would remove and let people decide what they want by really offering them incredibly good-quality products. Healthy competition and all that, you see.

Because if you think about it, one quite detrimental side effect of a locked-down ecosystem is that you as a company (especially if you’re in Apple’s position) are not exactly incentivised to provide quality software. Apple still makes good hardware, but when software is concerned, the ‘good quality’ is essentially a myth today. The quality here is mostly tied to Apple’s reputation and legacy, but its software has been on a downward spiral since Jobs passed away. With so many locked-in customers, you can get away with so many things, such as the appalling quality and reliability of iCloud services, which is incredibly baffling considering the resources of a trillion-dollar company and the fact that by now iCloud has been around for twelve years. Same with Siri, another 12-year-old fiasco. And some people complain, but due to the intricacies of switching to third-party solutions, or even migrating entirely, they remain within Apple’s ecosystem, so customer retention is really not something Apple is terribly worried about.

So, since people don’t really have enough power to make tech companies behave in a more customer-friendly way, it’s entirely natural that the government step in to act as a sort of mediator. I don’t know if it’s because I’m European and have a different mindset from an American citizen, but I welcome this attempt by the EU Commission to legislate and provide a set of rules Big Tech should abide by, and nowadays I prefer this over a scenario where Big Tech can control and manipulate our lives without any kind of supervision.

You could cynically point out that both Apple and the EU Commission are pushing their own agendas using the ‘customer’s best interests’ as a pretext. But the difference between a big tech company that uses customer friendliness and acting in the customers’ best interests as essentially marketing ploys, and a governmental body drawing legislation that should be more protective of customers’ rights, is that the latter necessarily involves accountability. Laws and regulations are codified and written down. They aren’t blurbs on a website you can retroactively change or delete if the wind turns a certain way. How much accountability has Apple had for all the troubles and headaches they created with the MacBook’s butterfly keyboards? Is that pro-customers? The way they’ve handled the whole ‘right to repair’ matter, does that look pro-customers to you? A governmental body wanting to create some legislative framework and regulations Big Tech must comply with in order to operate within a specific territory (not in the whole world), is that really the enemy here?

Innovation, schminnovation

Don’t even get me started with the argument that the European Digital Markets Act is stifling innovation. Eleven goddamn years with the Lightning connector — is that innovation? Persisting with an aging, proprietary solution even when every other port in every other Apple device is standard? What’s innovative or even remotely user-friendly here?

And opening up Apple’s ecosystem and allowing the sideloading of any kind of compatible app isn’t exactly stifling innovation, either. Quite the opposite, because when people can install whatever software they like on your devices, you are absolutely incentivised to innovate. Firstly because, if you really have at heart your customers’ best interests, you ought to start taking security and privacy even more seriously. Secondly because, when your customers aren’t pushed to use your first-party solutions, you want to keep reeling them in by providing (but for real this time) the best software, services, and solutions you can come up with. You can’t afford to rest on your laurels.

A walled-garden structure hinders innovation in a more profound way than having an open structure or an environment where competitors are allowed to participate. In a closed ecosystem, only Apple has the final word on what you, the customer, may use or not use. Any innovation here either comes from Apple or from whatever third-party solution Apple allows you to use. And so many fanboys and techies are okay with that, mind-bogglingly. Because ApPlE kNoWs BeSt. And let me tell you, as an Apple user since 1989: Apple used to know best; they really knew best for a period of time. An era when the company was much more genuine in their intents and purposes, an era when their main goal was really to put technology, innovation, and customers first (how much they cared for the final user was intrinsic to, and apparent in, the very way the operating system’s UI was designed); by doing that, the money and the revenue just came as a natural consequence.

The passion was palpable. Even in the most delicate phase in Apple’s history, when they acquired NeXT and Jobs returned at the helm, and Apple’s future was entirely uncertain, Jobs didn’t approach the situation by thinking, In what way can we make money and save our arses? — Had he thought that, Apple would have probably released a computer or device completely in line with what people wanted or expected in 1998. Instead we got the iMac, which was an utter left-field move whose success was far from guaranteed. It was a different, unexpected product, getting rid of almost all legacy connections seen in previous Macs, getting rid of the floppy drive in a tech landscape where that was still a widely used medium. But it also made a lot of stuff easier, and made personal computing a more pleasant affair overall. The Think Different marketing campaign was also stellar, and it certainly helped with the sales. But in the end, the iMac’s success rewarded Apple’s innovation and courage (yeah, that was courage).

Opening up Apple’s ecosystem is not making a disservice to the customers; and is not really an obstacle to innovation. It’s reducing Apple’s immense control over their ecosystem and over their customers. And look, Apple isn’t the only entity classified as gatekeeper in this scenario — there are other five big-tech companies, too. The issue isn’t, Should a governmental body decide how a company shapes the ecosystems the company itself created? — The issue is more like, Should Apple (and Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft) have this level of control over people’s personal lives and livelihoods, and society at large? With little to no accountability, at that?

And by the way, if you like using Apple products and ecosystems as they are, the provisions of the DMA won’t really change your experience. You can keep using the App Store as Apple intended and never install any kind of extraneous software on your iPhone or iPad. And Apple’s compliance with the DMA is only expected in the EU territories. It’s up to the company to decide whether it’s worth complying and keeping the presence on the European market. The burden is entirely on Apple’s shoulders here, and their protests over the supposed threat to innovation the DMA poses really sound like the crocodile tears of someone playing the victim. If your attitude is to defend Apple, rather than your rights as a customer, I’m sorry to say this but you’re a fool.

The real end of Apple

There’s this interesting passage in the Steve Jobs Lost Interview with Robert X. Cringely (1995). In discussing Xerox’s failure, Jobs says:

Oh, I actually thought a lot about that. And I learned more about that with John Sculley later on, and I think I understand it now pretty well. What happens is, like with John Sculley… John came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox… So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers. So that’s what happened at Xerox.

Apple, as it is and as it operates today, is gradually becoming like this. The process is subtler, of course, and perhaps not entirely irreversible. But if and when comes a point where you can exactly identify Apple in these words from 28 years ago, then you’ll have the real end of Apple, and the final disintegration of its DNA.

Wondersomethingsomething

September 21, 2023

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

I don’t know if you realised this, but the Lightning connector on iPhones has had a longer lifespan than the headphone jack. Apple was quicker to remove a well-established, widespread standard in the name of ‘courage’, yet left Lightning — a proprietary, and by now aging connector — on iPhones for eleven years. With Apple, it should be clear by now that ecosystem comes before customers.

I didn’t really want to write this article. Not for lack of enthusiasm (though that is still present), but for a matter of honesty. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t watch the Apple “Wonderlust” event on 12 September. I don’t know if it was my workload or just plain absentmindedness, but I simply forgot about it and went for a walk instead. I tried to watch it the day after on Apple’s website, and I don’t know if I was tired or (as my contacts on social media suggest) if the event itself was boring, but I fell asleep after about 20 minutes.

So I really don’t have firsthand impressions about the event. I watched some shorter summaries on YouTube, and the excellent recap-with-critical-commentary video by Quinn Nelson, which gave me a fairly good idea of what was introduced at the event, and whether it matters.

I’m writing this piece only because I’ve received a significant-enough number of emails and requests that couldn’t just be ignored. But I wanted to be honest and clear about a few things: I missed the event, I’m not particularly interested in any of the things Apple introduced, and in my (very biased) commentary I may miss some nuances or details I could have caught if I’d taken a much deeper dive into these things.

For me the biggest deal of the event is the introduction of USB‑C on the iPhone, at long last, after the European legislators beat some standard sense into Apple. The rest — and I’m borrowing the impression of many who watched the event in its entirety — was pretty much a boring, predictable expanse. In his article about the event, John Gruber goes on for almost 700 words in the introduction to explain that this event may have been boring to some people, and that the iPhone September events may be repetitive and iterative in nature but are actually very much iconic, “the Super Bowls of technology”. I find that to be a very hilariously American-centric comparison. A lot of people outside the US don’t know when the Super Bowl is supposed to happen, and some regular folks don’t even know what the Super Bowl specifically is, apart from a vague ‘big American sports event’. The first time I heard about it, many many years ago, I initially thought it was related to bowling.

Despite Gruber’s attempts to paint the ‘Wonderlust’ event as something iconic and exciting, these past few years Apple’s September iPhone events have really felt boring and repetitive. A very diverse network of people has grown around me, both online and offline; the spectrum goes from very tech-savvy nerds and developers, to regular folks who are tech literate enough to use current devices unaided, to people who are not into tech at all and rely on the advice of others to make their purchases. And while such network can only produce anecdotal data, I’ve seen statistics made with smaller samples. So, when I said, Damn, I forgot Apple’s event was today and went out for a walk instead, a lot of people in my network told me I didn’t really miss out on anything special. The majority of those I interacted with weren’t particularly excited about anything regarding the event.

Compared with the previous generation, the new iPhones are faster, have an improved camera system, and are made with different materials. I could use these words to describe the iPhone 11 line compared with the X, XS and XR iPhone models. But Rick, this time titanium is a big deal, because it makes iPhones lighter than their predecessors. Well, it was about time, I’d say. Since today we have to endure oversized smartphones, making them lighter is the least Apple and other brands could do.

According to some tech YouTubers, the new camera system in the iPhone 15 Pro models is a big deal too. It’s probably a big deal for those who rely on their phones for all their photography and videography needs. Hardware-wise these cameras are a true engineering feat, and thanks to the computational heavy lifting behind the scenes, the final result can be stunning in the right hands. But as someone who uses cameras, not smartphones, for most of his photography, smartphone photography has become less interesting and less exciting exactly since computational photography has taken the lion’s share of image processing. Photos, even good photos taken with the last four generations of iPhones to me — to me — look artificial, clinical, lacking character (That ‘Apple website’ flair, a friend commented), at times overprocessed and with a somewhat weird colour science. Like I said on Mastodon, when showing older iPhone photos, I often get asked which camera I used. When seeing shots taken with more current iPhones, I often hear comments like, Yep, typical iPhone look.

The fact that the cameras on the iPhone 15 Pro models will be able to shoot ‘spatial videos’ — which, as far as I know, you’ll only be able to enjoy through the Vision Pro headset — and that for some this is another big deal, is another hilarious detail for me. And another example of ecosystem before customers. These 3D memories that will feel like magic in your Apple Vision Pro, how long they’ll truly last? After the death of my mother I had to sell my parents’ house and therefore remove all our personal belongings. In doing so, I came across a huge amount of memories in the form of old slides and printed photos (in most cases with their negatives carefully preserved). I saw pictures of myself when I was just a little child. I saw scenes from my parents’ and grandparents’ childhoods. Photos taken 50, 60, even 90 years ago. Will your children and grandchildren, 90 years from now, be able to watch that spatial video you shot in late 2023 or 2024? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe after a long chain of format conversions. Maybe through applications created by wise souls who see past the innovation du jour of our tech overlords.

I digress. I wanted to understand if these new iPhones were actually this big deal some kept repeating. A few YouTubers all seemed to sing to the tune of ‘the new iPhone looks like a small update, but there’s much more to it than meets the eye’. So I turned to more prominent and established tech reviewers like Marques Brownlee, Dave Lee, Michael Fisher. They always have the most balanced reviews, I think, because they’re all constantly using and testing different platforms, and when it comes to new features on a phone, they can look farther than any fanboy and put things in a more objective perspective.

After listening to their impressions, my takeaway is that, well, the new iPhone 15 and 15 Pro are actually an incremental update and little more. Here are the features that, based on these reviewers, seem worth mentioning:

The new building materials. Titanium is a good choice especially because it allows the new iPhone 15 Pro models to be lighter than last year’s Pro models, but also feel even lighter in the case of the Pro Max.

Better displays. Brighter than the iPhone 14 and 14 Pro displays. This means better clarity and legibility when outdoors. The displays on the regular iPhone 15 and the iPhone 15 Pro have the same characteristics and specifications. The only two features missing from the non-Pro iPhones are always-on display and ProMotion.

Speaking of ProMotion, I love this bit in Dave Lee’s video review:

I really think they [Apple] used [ProMotion] to distinguish the difference between the Pros and the ‘Amateurs’, because I don’t think that the cost of production is that far apart at this point, at least not for Apple, because the volumes are so high. But when I review these phones and see them side by side, the 60 Hz [screen] just got to stutter, right? But I really think if I remove myself from this situation and I try not to be a sweaty tech nerd about it, I really think, like, 99% of the world doesn’t care about it. I’ve shown it to many of my friends and my family members, and they’re like, Yeah, that’s cool, that ProMotion is neat and all, but who cares? And in that line, very very little media takes advantage of that stuff; very few games take advantage of 120 Hz [refresh]. But it’s mostly just the UI. When you’re in the UI, and you’re browsing on your phone, and doing stuff, having ProMotion is just so much nicer to look at — if your eyes are used to it. And the fact that they [the regular iPhone 15 models] don’t have it is just ridiculous, because there are phones out there that are, like, 300 bucks that have 120 Hz displays, for it to be missing on a $700 phone… It hurts.

Thinner bezels. The regular iPhone 15 models have slightly thinner bezels than the regular iPhone 14 models from last year. But the bezels on the 15 Pro models are much thinner. This may be excellent news for those nerds who are utterly obsessed with bezel thinness. I think there’s a limit to such thinness, because too thin bezels in a handheld device could mean involuntary user-interface interference from the palm of your hands or the edges of your fingers. Dave Lee quickly points this out too, saying this happened to him a few times while gaming.

USB‑C ports. Again, big Finally here. Thanks to EU legislation, which strongly reminded Apple that standards and customers come before ecosystems. It still sucks that you have to resort to a dongle if you use regular wired earphones or headphones with your iPhone. But at least when travelling you can just take the iPad charger, and one USB‑C cable to recharge the iPad, the iPhone, maybe a pair of over-ear noise-cancelling headphones, and you can use it to connect an external data drive if you use one with your iPad or Mac.

The new Action button. A new customisable button that on the iPhone 15 Pro models replaces the mute switch, which has been a constant on iPhones since the beginning. Now you can assign a specific function to this Action button (it acts like the mute switch by default), like launching the camera or the flashlight, or taking a voice memo. At first the selection seems limited, but one of the options allows you to assign a Siri shortcut, and this really opens the doors to all kinds of stuff. Reactions to this new Action button have generally been positive. Marques Brownlee suggests it could be further improved if we could also map additional functions to double-tapping (or even triple-tapping) the button. Dave Lee wishes there was some kind of tactile marking on it so you could feel for it when the iPhone is in your pocket, and in his review he stressed a few times that “it takes some time to get used to it”. As for me, I’m somewhat ambivalent. I both like the concept of a customisable button, and wish the physical mute switch could have remained. I wouldn’t mind an iPhone with the mute switch in the same position as it was before, and an Action button on the other side, maybe further down from where the power/sleep button is located. (It’s where some Nokia Lumia models had the dedicated camera button, and it was quite handy).

Slightly improved CPU performance. Much improved GPU performance. The fact that you can play triple‑A games like the Resident Evil remake on an iPhone is impressive, but the question is, why would you want to? The interface is cramped, the touch controls make things awkward, and with games like that, the better experience is definitely on a gaming PC or console like the PlayStation or Xbox. I know, I know there are portable gaming solutions like the Switch, the Steam Deck, the recently-introduced Lenovo Legion Go. But while these don’t have very big screens, they all have physical controls, so you don’t have to put your fingers on the screen when gaming, and the interface remains uncluttered.

Slightly better battery life. Tests may vary, but I found Dave Lee’s numbers very telling. The full table is visible at about the 13:13 mark in his video. He calls his test ‘Reddit refresh loop’, which I assume is self-explanatory. The iPhone 15 Pro Max lasted 12 hours and 27 minutes, eight minutes more than the iPhone 14 Pro Max. The iPhone 15 Pro lasted 11 hours and 37 minutes, twenty-one minutes more than the iPhone 14 Pro and the iPhone 13 Pro. The iPhone 15, instead, lasted a few minutes less than the iPhone 14.

The camera system. More megapixels, and a new 5× telephoto lens on the Pro Max, essentially. Some observations from Dave Lee which again, ring true based on what I could see for myself. About the resolution:

I don’t feel the sensor on the regular iPhone 15 makes good use of that extra resolution, but on the Pro I would say […] it’s absolutely worth that larger file size. The details [in the photo] are there.

On low-light photography:

It’s still not great. Apple talked a bit about how they improved it, but the Pixel 7 devices and Samsung S23 devices [low-light photos] look better to me.

On lens flare:

Apple also talks about how they addressed some of the lens flare that has been in some of their photography. Sometimes you’ll see some reflective orbs floating around some of your shots; they’re definitely less pronounced on the iPhone 15 cameras, but they’re still visible here and there, and it’s particularly noticeable still in night shots with bright lights.

Automatic Portrait Mode. I like how simply Dave describes it: It’s the ability to just take a shot, not think about it, and the phone will capture the depth data, so you can adjust the focus later. And I agree with him, it’s a cool feature. I used to use a couple of ‘defocusing’ photo apps on my iPhone 8 to achieve something similar, but of course the iPhone 15’s image processing power guarantees a much faster, more accurate and effective result.

Update — 22 Sept. — I was pretty sure I had seen a similar feature before, but couldn’t recall where or when exactly. My friend Tony on Mastodon reminded me of Nokia Refocus (later renamed Lumia Refocus), an application Nokia presented at Nokia World 2013 — yes, ten years ago — that allowed you to take a shot and refocus later. In this article on Windows Central it is explained that

When snapping a shot, the Windows Phone will take numerous photos over the focus range. This makes it possible to simply hit the shutter button without messing around for three days to get the right object in focus. Think about this example: you take a self-shot and the background is in focus behind a blurry face. With Refocus you can select your own self and boom, the focus is now corrected. Alternatively, you can choose to have the entire shot in focus.

I’ve linked to an archived version of the article because it preserves the video at the end, where you can see a live demonstration of how the feature works. There is also this article from The Verge, and the related YouTube video where Tom Warren demoes the feature.

And yes, of course it’s faster and better on the new iPhones. But considering that the Nokia Lumia 1020 did the same thing with a dual core processor and 2 GB of RAM, the slight delay when capturing a photo with Refocus is forgivable.

It sounds like a lot, but if you zoom out and look at the evolution (or lack thereof) of the iPhone over the years, there’s really nothing groundbreaking about these new iPhone models. Some reviewers have spent a considerable time talking about the new building materials of the iPhone 15 line, especially the use of titanium on the Pro iPhones. It’s undoubtedly a cool detail, and it’s great that it makes the phones lighter. But essentially what we got with the new iPhones was entirely within expectations and educated guesses. Faster devices with improved cameras. But ‘faster’ and ‘improved’ in an iterative fashion, not in a ‘leaps and bounds’ or ‘night and day’ fashion. Meaning that if you asked me, Should I really upgrade to the iPhone 15? I’d tell you, If you currently own an iPhone older than the 12, sure. If you’re hell-bent on always having the latest iPhone camera technology because it really matters to you, sure. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.

Of course, at the end of the day, you do you. If you have money to burn, and love to get a new iPhone every year, here’s a lighter. I simply encourage people to be smart and not wasteful, because there’s too much waste today already. There are those telling you you should upgrade to the iPhone 15 Pro for the new titanium finish alone, because it makes for a svelter device that feels great in the hand. Do you know what feels even greater in the hand? Ten 100-dollar bills.

My lack of excitement about the iPhone in general comes from the fact that for the past few years it hasn’t really gone anywhere. I’m not one who demands constant innovation, mind you, but at the same time you can’t expect enthusiasm from me for any minor change or improvement. In technology there are occasional bumps of innovation, and inertial periods of iteration which can last a long time. The smartphone category as a whole has been stagnant for a while now. I’m not really complaining about this — again, it’s a necessary evil. But I can wish Apple showed more intent in thinking out of the box with the iPhone. Going foldable is what some wish for a future iPhone. But that isn’t thinking out of the box — it’s following a trend (and an uncertain one at that).

I know Apple is playing safe with the iPhone because it’s a cash cow, but sometimes I wish they revisited the iPhone line by maybe offering one less ‘safe’ model and using that vacant slot to propose something different, quirkier. Something that could be niche for a couple of generations, just to see where it goes. A ‘Special Edition’ in the true sense of the word. And not just from a hardware standpoint, but also from an application/usage standpoint. An iPhone model perhaps with different ways of interfacing, even. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Apple is pursuing that with Vision Pro and visionOS, and I see your point. I just wish it weren’t an AR headset. Something more in line with what Humane is headed towards. I want ‘vision’ without the impracticality and awkwardness of VR/AR goggles.

I was forgetting the new Apple Watches — Well, again, iterative improvements all around. If you love the Watch, you’ll love them. If you don’t, you’re probably shrugging as hard as I am. Neither its design nor its interface have ever really clicked with me. The general feeling I constantly get when I look at its UI is that it’s too crowded and complicated, too dependent on gestures with mediocre discoverability. And the Watch as a whole simply feels too chock-full of stuff. And every year Apple seems to be adding more stuff to the Watch’s capabilities. It feels like pure feature creep. (To be entirely fair, the competition isn’t exactly doing a better job in this regard). Again, it depends on what you use a smartwatch for. I just want a bare-bones tracker that tells me the time and date, that shows me a step counter and a heart rate monitor. I don’t need a miniature smartphone on my wrist, I already have one in my pocket.