Riccardo Mori

Flickr’s new boss, not the same as the old boss

November 11, 2018

Flickr’s new management has made a controversial decision for the new year, as you may know by now. As CNET summarises:

SmugMug, trying to strengthen its Flickr site as a community for photo enthusiasts, will limit free members to 1,000 photos and scrap the old policy of a terabyte of storage in an attempt to move toward subscriptions.

The move, accompanied by a 30 percent discount on the $50 annual Flickr pro membership through Nov. 30, is the first big business shift at the photo-sharing site since SmugMug’s acquisition of Flickr from Verizon’s Yahoo earlier this year. And while it’ll mean some members have to decide whether to spend some money or save their photos, it also means Flickr’s interests are directly aligned with those of its members, not those of advertisers, Flickr vice president of product Andrew Stadlen said in a blog post Thursday.

I have been a Flickr member since 2005, and a Pro member since maybe 2006. Historically, this is just one of the many controversial decisions Flickr members had to endure. I don’t remember the various changes Flickr introduced over the years, and making a list of them is not the point of this piece anyway; but I remember that the majority of them were not popular among Flickr’s users. The one I do remember was the site’s major redesign, which I truly disliked at first; it felt sloppy and user-hostile in some areas. It eventually got better.

But this most recent move? It’s anything but controversial for me. I couldn’t welcome it more.

The bad guy here is not SmugMug, but Flickr’s previous management. Offering 1 terabyte of storage (with ads) to free accounts was a move of Google-like proportions. The problem was that Yahoo was not Google, and this is something more people should have realised at the time, not in retrospect. Do you think that 1 terabyte of storage space is really free? It’s not. Advertising, and your data being passed to advertisers, pays for it. The moment you remove advertising from the equation, giving such enormous storage space to free accounts becomes immediately unsustainable. I am as dense as osmium when it comes to understanding economics, but even I was able to figure this out.

From reading Flickr’s forums, the two primary pain points of this upcoming change are these:

Limiting free members to 1,000 photos means that current free members with more than 1,000 photos in their account will only have access to the 1,000 most recent photos, and all the older ones will be deleted (except those under a Creative Commons licence, if I got this right).
Grandfathered Pro accounts will be automatically charged $49.99 — the same fee as new Pro accounts — instead of $24.95 at renewal time, and there’s no discount or other promotion for them. Some users whose account is bound for renewal shortly are the most annoyed. But I’ve also seen a lot of old-timers like myself complain about this and manifest their intention of not renewing their Pro membership.

Here’s what I think:

If you currently have a free account with more than 1,000 photos and you’re uploading materials that you feel have some value for the community, and for the Internet at large (historical photo collections, rare archival images, scanned documents, etc.), then subscribing to a Pro account should be a no-brainer, even at $50/year. If you feel you’re doing important work, and you think it’s unreasonable to pay the service that hosts your materials $4.16 per month, you could always try asking for donations or start a Patreon account.
If you — especially after Flickr started offering 1 TB of storage to free accounts — began using the site as your personal photo dumping ground, and don’t want to pay to keep using it that way, consider moving your photos elsewhere, or separating the wheat from the chaff yourself, so that you can showcase your best work, not a whopping 250 bad shots, untitled and untagged, from that cool party you went last week. And hey, if you’re a hardcore cheapskate, you can always open more free accounts and fill them up, 1,000 photos at a time.
People hate advertising, but — guess what — they also hate paying to have it removed. There is no free lunch, folks. There’s crappy food and good food, though. If in order to keep a service healthy and sustainable there’s a price to pay, so be it. And I believe $50/year ($4.16/month) is an entirely reasonable price to pay.
Storage space has its costs. Don’t start your objections with “But Google Photos offers…” You know how Google makes money, right? You know Google isn’t a charity, right? When most of such costs are paid by advertisers, then you can offer whatever you want to your users ‘for free’. Also, take a look at all the free tiers from companies offering cloud storage services. If they are free tiers which also provide an ad-free experience, usually the amount of storage you’re given is not that huge.
Old-time members with grandfathered Pro accounts should be reminded that Flickr started charging $49.99/year for new Pro accounts back in 2015, but kept the price at $24.95/year for all grandfathered Pro accounts with automatic renewal. This grace period, in my opinion, has lasted enough and has been a nice gesture for enough time. I’m sorry, but I just can’t agree with those who say that now Flickr is “charging too much, period.” I may agree in part with those who say that $49.99/year could be too much if there aren’t enough improvements for Pro members in return. But I don’t think the situation is going to stay the same after this significant upcoming change and shift. If it helps eradicate advertising, spam accounts, spam comments, I’m personally glad to start paying $50 a year for a place that’s been an overall stable home and showcase for my humble photos for the past 13 years. (Fun fact: after 13 years I still haven’t managed to upload 1,000 photos…)

In his blog post, Flickr’s VP of product Andrew Stadlen also said:

We want to build features and experiences that delight you, not our advertisers; ensuring that our members are also our customers makes this possible. […] The overwhelming majority of pros have more than 1,000 photos on Flickr, and the vast majority of free members have fewer than 1,000. We believe we’ve landed on a fair and generous place to draw the line.

I agree, especially if you consider that, before offering 1 TB of space to everybody, free accounts were limited to 200 photos.

To me, it is obvious that these ‘drastic’ measures aren’t being done out of spite or greed. It is also obvious to me that behind this decision from the new management, there’s the intent of revitalising and redefining Flickr’s space and community, which I’ve felt going painfully adrift in recent years. If this change helps Flickr to refocus on being a place where people contribute their best efforts at photography, instead of encouraging users to treat it as just another cloud service to back up gigabytes of their stuff for free, then I believe this change can’t come soon enough.

Faster than its own OS

November 7, 2018

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

– Hey, where are you going so fast?
– I don’t know, but I’ll surely get there first.

When talking about the last generations of iPad Pros, something that tech pundits like to point out is their sheer power. Apple excels so much at designing their chips that these iPad Pros are able to outperform most current PCs, even MacBook Pros. In his review, John Gruber brings up the subject almost immediately:

The main appeal of an iPad has always been about the experience of using one. It still is. But put that aside for a moment and consider the new iPad Pro only as a portable computing device. Its performance, both from the CPU and GPU, is simply bananas. It’s nuts. Astounding performance per dollar, astounding performance per watt.

Apple bragged during the iPad Pro introduction that they are faster than 92 percent of notebook PCs sold in the last year. That’s not so funny when you consider that “PCs”, in this formulation, includes MacBooks. iPads were popular and useful when they were much slower than typical notebooks. Now they’re faster than all but the highest-end notebook PCs. They’re just staggeringly impressive, well-balanced computers.

But ever since I started hearing this argument (perhaps since the first generation of iPad Pros), a question that’s been nagging me – a question I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer to – is this: All this staggering performance… to do what, exactly?

I know, you are going to quickly point me in the direction of the example Gruber himself makes in his review – using Adobe Lightroom to edit 50-megapixel RAW images from a high-end digital camera. Good example. I’m sure there are a few others regarding digital artists, drawing and painting with an Apple Pencil, etc.

iPad is more than eight years old at this point. I’d be surprised if it couldn’t do such things. The way I see the iPad today is as if it were a car prototype that keeps getting faster and more efficient at every iteration… and has nowhere to run. Or maybe it does, but it’s a test race track, and it is the only car running on it. To prepare for a competition that never comes. The solitude of the peerless.

iPad is probably the only Apple device with a deep-seated identity crisis. Steve Jobs gave it the right starting point in 2010: a device that could fill the gap between smartphones and laptop computers. Then, over time, that gap has progressively narrowed because smartphones have increased their versatility on one front, and laptops have increased their versatility and portability on the other. What could tablets do at that point? Well, most of them have simply withered away. iPad had the opportunity to redefine its category uniquely and demonstrate that tablets could take advantage of their strengths to become something else, something self-sufficient, capable of redefining personal computing. I like to think that this is what Steve Jobs had in mind, eight years ago.

Some people believe that the iPad has delivered on this in spades, but I’m not one of them. Many power iPad users seem to want this device to become more like a Surface. A 2‑in‑1 device. A shape-shifting tablet that can act like a real laptop when needed. They require a versatility that the iPad, in my opinion, cannot provide yet because it still has an operating system that treats it like a big iPhone, most of the time. iPad is this hybrid entity with the hardware capabilities of a traditional computer, and the mind (software) of a smartphone. That’s one part of the identity crisis. The other part is that iPad still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. And on the hardware front, it has definitely grown up now.

iOS, in its current form, is still inadequate for the iPad. To truly shine as a tablet, as a portable powerhouse, iPad needs adequate software. It needs apps that really take advantage of all these unparalleled tech specs and hardware capabilities. But it also needs an operating system that’s more thoughtfully tailored to the iPad’s format and user experience. Sure, iOS has become more iPad-friendly with the last two releases, but it just can’t keep up with the hardware. The iPad should have started to have its iOS branch or flavour years ago — I’d say around the time of the third- or fourth-generation iPad at the latest. Just as it makes sense for the AppleTV to have tvOS and for the Watch to have watchOS, it would make even more sense if the iPad had its custom iOS with controls, behaviours, user interface, that treated it like the powerful tablet that it is.

It’s ridiculous that these new, expensive, iPad Pros, despite having a versatile USB‑C connection, still can’t handle external volumes when plugged in. It’s ridiculous that when you attach a camera or a card reader, the import experience is essentially the same inflexible process as on the first iPad. It’s counterproductive that the operating system still favours first-party applications and not a smoother interoperability among different third-party applications. (Yes, yes, Siri shortcuts… Sorry, not enough.) iPads today are incredible devices with hardware characteristics and specifications that give them unparalleled raw power and flexibility — at least on paper. In practice, hardware is just half of the equation. The importance of software and of an optimised OS mustn’t be overlooked. On Twitter I was making a simple counterexample — that I can still put my first-generation iPad to good use thanks to a good combination of apps, and to a version of iOS (5.1.1) which is so well-tuned to the hardware that makes this iPad more responsive than a third-generation model with four times the RAM, better processor, and iOS 9.3.5.

I think that a good set of apps and a more versatile, more tightly integrated OS with these new iPad Pros should be a given. Instead, we’re still ‘getting there’, while the hardware (design and tech specs) is already beyond there, waiting for the software to catch up. This combination still requires a fair amount of versatility on the user’s part to be effective. This software/hardware gap is especially frustrating when you have iPad Pro configurations that cost more than a traditional, high-end laptop.

Tech’s high speed, and my low tide

October 16, 2018

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

This is mostly a rant. Read it as such.

I haven’t written much as of late, creatively or otherwise. Fiction-wise, my works-in-progress proceed at a glacial pace, but at least they proceed. It’s not a creative block, because I know where I want my novel and my stories to go. It’s more like ‘execution fatigue’, if that makes any sense: when stories and plots are complex, there is a lot to check while you actually write. You may have a nice idea to keep the story going, but will the execution of that idea conflict with previous information about a character and/or their arc? Is the new idea so great that it’s worth the additional work of going back and alter previous elements of the narrative so that continuity is maintained? I don’t know if people truly understand the amount of work there can be behind a book. Especially when the author — as is the case with yours truly — has to take care of everything related to the publication of the book.

As for technology, it’s one of those periods when I’m feeling overwhelmed by everything revolving around it. Debates are exhausting. Trying to explain that Facebook and Google are bad for your privacy health is like explaining to smokers and gluttons the long-term respiratory and cardiovascular issues they’ll face due to their habits and addictions. It’s a long, exhausting explanation versus instant gratification and versus the fact that using Google and Facebook services — like smoking a cigarette or eating a chocolate cake — doesn’t seem to be so bad in the here & now. “But it’s so easy, so convenient! Who cares about the implications? I still haven’t seen anything nasty made by Google or Facebook against my privacy…” This is what I get after 15–20 minutes spent carefully and thoughtfully explaining how the adverse effects from trusting these companies with your data may not be immediately noticeable. Or they ask me for solutions. Since I’ve spoiled their fun, now I’m obligated to do their homework for them. “Then how am I supposed to keep in touch with my friends!?” “Then how am I supposed to migrate my email archives and sync my stuff!?” And don’t get me wrong, I often come up with alternatives, but it’s not enough. I try to teach people to fish better, they simply want the better fish served on a plate. When you point out that, at this point, things are leaving the ‘giving advice’ territory and entering into ‘consulting work’ area, which implies a fee, they either get angry or laugh at you.

You know what, then? Keep your Google and your Facebook. Buy their hardware. Let these companies into your own home, give all your data to them. I’ll see you at the next data breach, and it may be a data breach affecting another company you never heard from, but which has your data anyway because they got them from Google or Facebook.

But it’s not just this. It’s not that both regular people and tech nerds can be utterly exhausting to argue with, for different reasons. It’s a general feeling of dissatisfaction and disappointment towards… well maybe more towards the tech world than technology itself. Anyway.

Instant gratification is what seems to be killing perspective, too. If it’s not ‘new’ and ‘now’, it’s not cool. The problem, of course, is that ‘new’ and ‘now’ literally get old soon. The bigger problem is that these two fragile pillars are among the most prominent in the tech world’s foundations today. When talking about my fondness for vintage technology and for putting now-considered-obsolete devices to good use, my interlocutor chuckled and remarked that “nothing lasts forever in tech”.

Actually I think the tragedy is that today, in tech, nothing lasts enough. This principle leads, for instance, to the discontinuation of perfectly working solutions just because someone says “It’s time to move on” (the headphone jack) and, more broadly, to the let’s fix what is not broken mindset. This principle also creates a general landscape where everything is in a constant beta state. Today, when we encounter something that is under continued development, it’s usually considered a good thing. The flip side, however, is that this something is also never finished; it never really enters a finished state. In most cases, ironically, today ‘finished state’ means when something (software, but also hardware) gets discontinued, abandoned; when its development ceases.

Finished should mean completed, and I’m already hearing your objection: But Rick, today it’s practically impossible to have a product that is complete and definitive, especially software-wise. And I understand. It’s this obsession with maintaining an unjustified breakneck pace that afflicts everything in tech. I’m not averse to change. I’m averse to this trend that everything has to change as fast as possible because we supposedly need the ‘latest version’ of every damn thing. Progress used to be measured in stages. Today it seems to be measured by speed. If you stop, you die. My present state of mind can only come up with one reaction: fuck this.

We may have different opinions and sensibilities when it comes to enjoying things. As a user of tech products, I feel that lately such products have simply been lasting too little to be actually enjoyed. I’m not talking about manufacturing qualities or the fact that most products aren’t physically ‘built to last’ anymore (though that’s also true). I’m mostly talking about obsolescence and for how long something is considered up-to-date and supported. And I think it’s too short a time, and that it’s also a largely artificially imposed timeframe. Again, the industry has kept accelerating to the point that now the pedal is stuck on the bottom of the car, and I wonder when— no, I wonder if this vicious circle will be broken someday.

To make an example, just imagine if Apple (or any other company with their means, for that matter) stopped introducing new iPhones, a new iOS and a new Mac OS version every year, shifted gears and changed the cycle to just one year and a half. Everyone involved — from Apple designers and engineers, to third-party developers, to end users — would have more time to work on the hardware and software, and to enjoy said hardware and software. More time to hopefully fix bugs that otherwise keep accumulating because by the time you get to look into them, it’s already time to get to work to the next version/iteration of the operating system or application. More time to perform hardware and software quality control. More time to develop for a specific device. And end users would feel they’re really making a good investment by spending more than a thousand dollars or euros in a smartphone.

If this sounds kind of weird to you, you’re probably feeling the pressure of the tech world. But stop and think for a moment. There is no strictly technical reason against slowing down the general pace. The reasons are all commercial. Today, in the tech industry, you’re either the first to release a product, or you release a better product in that particular category. And releasing better products is hard and risky when the shortcut seems to be ‘Get there first, then you can iterate and make it better later’.

Yes, I know, you’re not exactly forced to keep up with technology. It’s not that you have to own the latest and greatest products. But in more than 30 years I’ve never seen such a strong pressure to keep people inside the update loop, so to speak. Update cycles used to be slower: excluding demanding professional needs, you could still use the same computer after 5–6 years without encountering particular issues that pushed you to upgrade. Sure, maybe you ended up expanding the RAM and getting a bigger hard drive or a better graphics card, but you didn’t feel you had wasted thousands of dollars on your Mac or PC after a relatively short while. Fortunately, Apple products have retained a certain degree of longevity, but at the same time they’ve become less internally upgradable and less reliable. The needless complexity of today’s Web technologies doesn’t help, so that a 2012 iPad or a 2013 iPhone, both with dual-core processors and 1 GB of RAM, struggle to load several websites due to the added weight of their cookies and trackers and advertising crap.

Software quality suffers because of today’s silly race to whatever’s next; as I was saying before, there’s less time to develop and release quality stuff, so you rarely find well-optimised software for the hardware that’s supposed to run it. You often find bloated or badly-optimised software that only the latest hardware can run smoothly. You launch it on your two-year old Mac or four-year old iPad, and you (you regular user) are left thinking that your machine is already inadequate.

The other vicious circle is that, if you want to at least keep up with the latest developments in technology, you have to follow the tech press, and the tech press is another source of the pressure I was talking about. The press gladly feeds on the current breakneck pace of the tech industry. More stuff gets produced, so there’s more to write and talk about. And the press is obsessed with the ‘new’ and the ‘now’. Of course, otherwise there would be nothing to talk about, right? Not that regular people would notice, since it’s basically impossible to reach ‘RSS Feeds Zero’ anyway. And even when there’s actually nothing to talk about, let’s publish some silly comparison, or a poorly-informed but decidedly polarising opinion piece. Let’s talk about how boring that smartphone design is, there’s so little difference with last year’s model, and why don’t companies innovate anymore? Let’s push and push and demand more capable more captivating more inventive and original products than the ones released just six months ago… You take a look at tech channels on YouTube and you soon bang your head on your desk in frustration when you see things like The iPhone 8 in 2018… Still worth it? Spoiler: Yes, yes of course it’s still worth it. It’s still a very capable device, still capable of doing more things than you could possibly throw at it. Yes, the iPhone XS has a better camera, but I see the photos you publish online and you’re going to be fine with the iPhone 8, believe me.

The artificial need for speed, for the new & now, all trickles down to end users. Like pills of tech ecstasy being passed around. So I end up getting emails from friends asking me whether they should buy the new mirrorless full-frame Nikon Z7 camera. I ask what’s their current camera. A Nikon D850 (i.e. last year’s top-of-the-line Nikon DSLR). Why do you want to upgrade, I ask. They write back: Well, it’s a smaller, lighter camera. And it has one megapixel more. And I read that mirrorless cameras are the new direction anyway, so…

What would your response be if you were in my shoes? Mine is as honest as it gets: What can I say? I’ve purchased a second-hand Nikon D200 two years ago (Note: the D200 is a semi-professional DSLR Nikon introduced in 2005) and I still haven’t fully taken advantage of all its features. But if you feel you have outgrown your D850 already [seriously doubting this, even if they were making a living as pro photographers, which they don’t] then sure, go for it.

“It has one megapixel more”… Let that sink in for a moment.

ARgh

September 17, 2018

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

While reviewing my previously published impressions regarding Apple’s event, and rewatching bits of the keynote, I realised I’ve left out something I feel I should mention: Augmented Reality (AR). I could have included this with my notes and update my previous piece but, although I don’t have a lot to say on this subject, it perhaps deserves a separate treatment.

This is, I think, the third Apple event where we were shown a few AR demos. This time the excuse was the introduction of ARKit 2. Maybe it’s too early to judge, maybe I’ll be proven wrong down the road, but so far I haven’t seen any truly compelling implementation of AR. A nice exception, I’ll admit, was the Homecourt app. The execution looks solid, but most importantly, it’s one of those cases when you think of possible alternative implementations and come up with nothing that’s equally effective and effortless. As for the rest, I’ve seen several examples of little apps made with ARKit, and very often my reaction has been: That’s a cool effect, but that kind of user experience is just awkward or cumbersome. So far, most of what you do with AR has to be done using the device (iPhone, iPad) as both viewfinder and controller. That gets impractical really soon.

Gaming — which is something Apple seems to insist upon — is a particularly unfortunate example. Maybe I’m getting old, but dancing around while pointing an iPhone or iPad at surfaces around me isn’t my idea of fun. All the AR games or gaming experiences showcased during an Apple event so far haven’t struck me as being really immersive, either. Quite the contrary: AR seems to add a layer of detachment, and it feels as if you’re interacting with an illusion, a mirage that only your device sees and you have to rely on whatever you see through it to act within a game. In this regard, I personally found playing Wii tennis or bowling to be more engaging and fun.

If there’s indeed a next step in gaming, I consider Virtual Reality (VR) to be a more promising candidate overall. The current gear is crude and awkward, granted, but VR can potentially offer an unparalleled degree of immersion. Once you suit up for your VR experience, you may look ridiculous on the outside, but you are catapulted inside the experience. You are surrounded by it. You don’t have to move around looking through a device you’re constantly holding in front of you, always adjusting angle and distance, and having to interact with both the device and what you see through it.

Apple appears to believe a lot in AR, and again, perhaps they’ll turn out to be right in the end, but at the moment I simply see AR as Apple’s equivalent of Google Glass. Something that could be very useful within a specific, specialised range of use cases, but not the Next Big Thing the company is hoping for.

Roughly drafted impressions about Apple’s ‘Gather Round’ event

September 14, 2018

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Apple Special Event

0.

Let’s mention Steve Jobs right away. Some time ago I said to myself, “Rick, stop with the comparisons between Jobs’s Apple and Cook’s Apple. Let it go. You have to come to terms with it.” But at some unspecified point halfway the event, I realised just how bored I was feeling. I had prepared myself with a good cup of coffee, and I was alert and in a good mood when the event started. Yes, the names of the new iPhones had leaked — even an image of the new XS and XS Max, and another of the new Apple Watch Series 4. I didn’t mind. Design is how it works. I was curious about the details, the features. Did they manage to get rid of the iPhone X notch? No, the promo image was a bit deceiving, leaving the notch hidden, a shadow camouflaged in darkness. But after the soothing Apple Watch segment presented by Jeff Williams, and at some point while Phil Schiller was rattling off the iPhone XS technical specifications, I was there, finding myself watching this event more because I felt I had to, than because I felt engaged and amazed by what was presented, and how it was presented.

With Steve Jobs, everything was scripted and rehearsed, but there was a genuine energy coming from him, from his being thrilled and impatient to show us a new product, that everything felt lively and effortless. You saw he was the first to love and care about the product he was unveiling, and his excitement was contagious. These post-Jobs events are equally scripted and rehearsed, and… it shows. From start to finish. There was a moment in which Jeff Williams almost sounded tired of talking about the new Apple Watch. Schiller’s fast pace, more than showing excitement, makes him sound like someone who’s doing his part but really has an appointment elsewhere in half an hour and can’t wait to get in his car and hopefully skip some traffic. The last two things he felt really proud of were the 2013 Mac Pro design (LOL), and the removal of the headphone jack (sob!). What I perceived while watching the event was this: “These devices are going to sell themselves for their features alone and because we’re Apple, so let’s go through the motions and be done with it”. Sad!

0.5.

Related to the previous point, I miss seeing Jonathan Ive in the ‘Design videos’ of a product. He has a nice, friendly, polite/shy attitude when he explains the design choices and subtleties of a product, and that keeps you interested and engaged. By using just his voice for the narration, this virtual bond between designer and audience is broken, and you’re left with videos that are very well produced and executed, but aseptic. Ive’s voice and tone sound distant, detached. A narrator who just describes, without really conveying involvement.

0.9.

For what it’s worth, I liked the intro video. Kevin Lynch was funny, and the expression on the girl’s face when she finally says “The Clicker!?” was priceless. (Also ironic: Tim doesn’t seem to have used The Clicker that much during the keynote.)

1.

The Apple Watch Series 4 looks great and Apple has done a good job here. If I cared about smartwatches at all, this is finally the one I’d buy. The new faces with a mix of complications look… complicated, and crowded. Perhaps it’s different when you’re wearing the watch. But still, if the UI looks crowded by glancing at a giant close-up of the watch face, how can it not be crowded when you’re looking at a ~40 mm display on your wrist? Apple Watch wearers seemed excited by these new complications so… maybe it’s just me.

2.

It’s great that the Apple Watch Series 4 is targeted more towards old people (more sophisticated heart monitoring features, fall detection, etc.). I don’t know about you, though, but most of the old people I know need at least smartphones with 6‑inch displays and enlarged UI text to read and interact with the device interface. Again, maybe they’ll find the Watch display to be denser and the text sharper and easier to read. I’m merely pointing this out because someone on Twitter said that people were dismissing the Apple Watch without thinking about how useful it is to older folks.

3.

The iPhone XS left me utterly underwhelmed, with the sole exception being the engineering feat that is the A12 Bionic SoC. As far as ‘S’ models go, I tend to agree with Mark Gurman; the iPhone XS is perhaps the least impactful upgrade compared with the previous regular model. Past ‘S’ models all came with distinguishing features that made them appealing even to people with the previous year’s phone. As Gurman reminds us, the iPhone 3GS had a better camera with video recording capabilities, and Voice Control; the iPhone 4S had a significantly better camera than the 4, a dual-core processor versus the single-core of the iPhone 4, and more importantly it featured Siri; the iPhone 5S had Touch ID, the 64-bit A7 processor and M7 coprocessor; the iPhone 6S featured 3D Touch and 4K video capabilities. As Gurman mentions, this year the feature that most stands out in the iPhone XS is depth control in photos. I don’t know if that’s enough to make an iPhone X owner want to upgrade. Hard to say: people become unfathomable when iPhones are involved.

4.

The iPhone XR, on the other hand, got my attention. I like the design, and while the final judgment is seeing them in person, those colours really look great (my favourite are blue, yellow and Product Red). But more importantly, it is an interesting iPhone from a strategic standpoint. Spec-wise, it’s not that worse compared to the XS, and I think that Apple has done a great job in calibrating its features. The XR has the same chip as the XS, so there’s no crippled performance on this front. The cost-saving, ‘lesser’ features — aluminium frame, single camera system, LCD display instead of OLED, lack of 3D Touch — are exactly the kind of things many regular, non-nerd iPhone users don’t obsess over; for them, these lesser features aren’t deal-breakers. For Apple, it’s a win-win scenario: all people who come from older phones (say, 6S and 7), and are looking to upgrade, can find the kind of flagship iPhone they want. There is the deluxe tier, XS and XS Max; and the ‘base’ X‑class iPhone, the XR, that costs less, comes in great attractive colours, but is no slouch performance-wise. What’s more, it doesn’t feel cheap.

5.

Another two very attractive phones are the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8, now starting from $449 and $599 respectively. They’re still great phones at very interesting prices, especially the 7.

6.

If it’s true that the iPhone SE has effectively been discontinued, I think that this is a mistake on Apple’s part. There are still a lot of people who find all these new iPhones simply too big to handle, and the 4‑inch display and hardware design of the iPhone SE to be just perfect for them. I know it’s a hassle to optimise the software for such a variety of display sizes (4″, 4.7″, 5.5″, 5.8″-notched, 6.1″-notched, and 6.5″-notched), but technology should adapt to users’ needs more often, instead of the other way round. In a short thread on Twitter, Zeynep Tufekci writes:

“Welcome to the big screens” says Apple and women like me with small hands who need the most secure phone for safety reasons are stuck with something they can’t hold and constantly risk dropping. […] Especially noteworthy that they now have these screens without edges. They could even —gasp— introduce a newer small phone. Take away whatever bells and whistles you want. Androids aren’t safe or secure, and the only maybe feasible alternative, Google Pixel, is also too big.

Another great feature of the iPhone SE was its true affordability. Down the thread Tufekci also remarks:

I’ve lost count of the encounters I’ve had with dissidents, investigative journalists and others around the world at great risk of being hacked and subjected to terrible consequences who know they should get an iPhone for security but cannot afford it.

The current line of flagship iPhones is made up of big phones. True, the 5.8‑inch iPhone XS isn’t physically that much bigger than the 4.7‑inch iPhone 8, but the extremely reduced bezels and almost-all-screen design make the XS (and X) more difficult to operate while you’re holding it, especially in one-hand operations:

IPhone XS and 8

And, just to have a chuckle, let’s put the iPhone XS Max and the iPhone SE side by side. Max is really short for massive:

IPhone XS Max and SE

Even putting the price factor aside, these can be uncomfortable phones to handle for many people. I currently have an iPhone 5, which has the same design and measurements of the iPhone SE, and it handles very nicely in my hand. Unlike Ms Tufekci, I can handle bigger iPhones, but — and I tested this extensively — anything above a 4.7‑inch display becomes awkward quickly. I can hold an iPhone X in my hand, doing nothing; but when I hold it and use it, my grasp struggles; handling the phone when putting it away and pulling it out of a pocket becomes a very self-conscious operation. Gestures lose fluidity on an interface that suddenly takes most of the front surface of the phone. I can only begin to imagine the problems people with smaller hands may face.

There is also this great, succinct remark by Rob Weychert: I want a smaller phone, not bigger. I want to do less with it, not more.

7.

Anyone knows exactly what the ‘R’ in iPhone XR stands for? (I expected an iPhone XC, given the colour options.)

8.

Another nitpick: it appears that Apple is no longer including the small Lightning-to‑3.5mm jack adapter in the new iPhones’ boxes. You pay thousands of [insert your currency here] for an iPhone, and Apple doesn’t even give you a complimentary $9 adapter, which probably costs them $3 or $4? Stay classy, Apple.

9.

Speaking of money, fun fact: a 512 GB iPhone XS Max costs €1,659 here. Which is more than what I paid for my base 21.5‑inch retina 4K iMac with the BTO option of having 16 GB RAM instead of the stock 8 GB.

10.

And speaking of adapters: as “Not Jony Ive” pointed out on Twitter, the new iPhones — like the old iPhones — come with a Lightning-to-USB‑A cable in the box, which I’m sure MacBook and MacBook Pro users will find super-useful…

11.

During Schiller’s explanation of the camera features of the iPhone XS and XS Max, some of his claims sounded a bit off and/or exaggerated. At first I simply thought I was being too cynical, but then I found in my RSS feeds that Kirk McElhearn had noticed that, too, and he even points to an article on TechCrunch by Devin Coldewey who takes the time to expose and dissect: The 7 most egregious fibs Apple told about the iPhone XS camera. Some of the commenters don’t get it, and say that he’s splitting hairs, that he’s wrong, that even if Apple is not the first to implement certain features, it’s the first that gets them right, etc. That is often true, but that is also not the point. Coldewey, for instance, notes that stating “You can adjust the depth of field… this has not been possible in photography of any type of camera,” as Schiller did, is just not true. It has been done before. Is Apple the first to get this feature right? It’s quite likely. But then why not say exactly this? Why not say “No one before has implemented this feature so smoothly and intuitively”? It would still sound a bit hyperbolic or arrogant, but it wouldn’t be flat-out false.

12.

Overall, the device that most surprised me was the iPhone XR, hands down. I’d purchase one in blue or yellow, if I had the money. But it’s big, and still has a notch, and the all-screen design still does not fully convince me. Either from a hardware standpoint, or with regard to the graphical user interface design, interaction, usability.