Apple, mistakes, quality, innovation, etc.

September 6, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Craig Federighi, as quoted in this piece by Rick Tetzeli on FastCompany:

A world where people do not care about the quality of their experience is not a good world for Apple. A world where people care about those details and want to complain about them is the world where our values shine. That is our obsession.

Michael Tsai, back in August, in Learning from Apple’s Failures:

He’s saying the right things, but I’m not seeing this consistently come through in the products. Apple seems too unfocused, spread too thin, still in denial of how buggy their software has become. The iOS 9.3.4 update still hasn’t fixed the Camera audio bug, and it made my iPhone stop charging, at a very inconvenient time, so that I thought its Lightning port was damaged. Preview, long a reliable app, now regularly has drawing glitches and hangs. One of my apps hasn’t been up-to-date in the Mac App Store since May, and it is currently removed from sale, because of multiple backend store bugs. True or not, the perception is that the reality TV show and the car are distracting the company from working on the aging Mac lineup. Schiller’s triumphant “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass” line has become a punchline. The removal of the iPhone’s headphone jack seems like a parody of an Apple design decision. I want a new MacBook Pro, but at this point I’m more worried about the new keyboard and that Apple might do something more to make it less Pro, like remove Thunderbolt or the SD slot, than I am excited about what new features it might offer.

I feel exactly the same as Michael. I’m a long-time experienced Mac user. I’m not sure I would call myself a ‘pro’ user, because the way I use my Macs has always revolved around text processing, with frequent incursions into image editing & photo retouching, the occasional small project in iMovie or Final Cut Express, and the occasional gaming session. Mine are tasks that today’s non-Pro Macs could handle without much hassle. I love Macintosh computers of all vintages and I like to have a few finely-tuned machines around performing several different tasks and serving different purposes. While my main work machine, a 2009 MacBook Pro, is running current software and is still a dependable workhorse despite being seven years old, those secondary Macs are all PowerPC machines, most with a G4 processor, all running either Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.8) or Tiger (10.4.11), all manufactured between the years 2000 and 2004.

I mention this because my particular setup, a mix of old and newer hardware and software, may give me a certain perspective about the merits and flaws of ‘the new Apple’ versus ‘the old Apple’. And I can’t but confirm the impression that quality and focus have wandered a bit in recent years.

Whenever I’m working on one of my vintage G4 Macs, whenever I’m back using Mac OS X Tiger or Leopard, I very rarely encounter bugs or ‘surprises’. While I’m sure Tiger and Leopard aren’t perfect operating system versions where every single bug has been dealt with, the daily user experience on those machines appears to be seamless, and the environment extremely stable. When I wake one of my G4 PowerBooks from sleep, the reconnection to my home wireless network is instantaneous and reliable. On my MacBook Pro — even under the latest El Capitan minor update — it is still a hit-or-miss affair. Same with any Bluetooth peripheral that may be connected to the Mac. 

Working with external displays doesn’t pose any kind of problem, and I’m able to connect/disconnect my PowerBooks to the bigger displays I own by simply removing the DVI-to-VGA or Mini DVI-to-VGA adapters (made by Apple), without having to put the computer to sleep or doing any other kind of voodoo procedure. To do the same with my MacBook Pro, I have to leave the MiniDisplay-to-VGA adapter connected, and disconnect the display’s VGA cable from the adapter’s VGA port. Because if I don’t do that, when I reconnect the adapter to the MacBook Pro, the Mac shuts down abruptly. I still don’t know the reason after all these years, and it’s not a faulty adapter because I already changed it (unless I was so unlucky as to get a second faulty adapter). And it’s not just that: every now and then, for no reason, when I wake my MacBook Pro with the external display attached, Display preferences get messed up, the display wakes in a different, lower resolution, with a different refresh rate; its colour profile isn’t loaded, and I have to repeatedly disconnect/reconnect the cable until everything’s back to normal. (Oh, of course I also need to reposition and resize several Finder and application windows when this happens.) 

I still stand by what I wrote in The perceived decline in Apple’s software quality, published in early 2015, but there’s something I want to add to this paragraph:

But looking at things from a more emotional, more personal standpoint, something has indeed changed. Above I said that, in the past, us long-time Mac users were more willing to put up with flaws in the Mac operating system and first-party applications because the total amount of such occasional annoyances wasn’t enough to affect the general level of satisfaction of working with Mac OS. I suspect that this perceived decline in the quality of Apple’s software products (OS X included) is more related to the nature of the flaws/bugs/annoyances, than the sheer number of those. In other words, it’s not that Apple’s software is quantitatively more buggy today than, say, in the Mac OS 8–9 era, but the issues are (or feel) more critical, and that in turn affects the general level of satisfaction of working with the Mac.

As time passes, I wouldn’t call it ‘decline’, but a progress characterised by an increased rocking movement, a sort of to and fro between progression and regression, with an environment where the addition of a couple of new features makes something else break or behave in unexpected ways. This is nothing new in software development, from what I hear (I’m not a developer myself), but Mac OS X, in general, felt less volatile in the Tiger-Leopard-Snow Leopard years. Yosemite felt like a regression after Mavericks’ improvement over Mountain Lion, and having a user interface with a new coat of paint felt like a pretty much insignificant gain when you consider major underlying issues including (but not limited to) network connectivity. El Capitan is definitely better and more stable, but still with issues popping up every now and then for no apparent reason (visual glitches in the Dock, the Finder that sometimes doesn’t update the amount of disk free space for hours, menubar icons disappearing then reappearing after a logout/login, intermittent Wi-Fi connectivity, the Preview issues mentioned by Tsai, the increased unpredictability of Disk Utility, etc.)

Regarding Apple’s innovation, I’m not a naysayer. I’m not saying that Apple, post-Jobs, has ceased to innovate. What I’ll say, from my humble point of view, is that Apple’s innovation, too, feels different, more fragmented and ‘schizophrenic’. There are areas of brilliance, there are unquestionable feats of engineering and manufacturing (I find the Taptic engine particularly ingenious, not to mention all the technology in current and upcoming iPhone cameras and retina displays), but certain design decisions seem to reflect a lack of a plan, and seem motivated more by a sort of Let’s try this thing approach. Other ideas seem to work very well, like 3D Touch, until you realise that only a limited subset of devices can take advantage of it, and this creates a different usability and UI experience on iOS depending on whether your device supports 3D Touch or not.

Certain iterations are starting to feel a bit too exhausting, like — and this is one of my strongest pet peeves, I know — the insistence on thinness when it comes to laptops. I understand, to a point, the compromises Apple chose when creating the 12-inch MacBook. You wanted to produce the ultimate portable machine, sacrificing (in part) CPU performance and, more importantly, ports. But what’s the reasoning behind making the next MacBook Pros thinner than the current ones? Lightness and portability are important, but maybe they are not the most important features pro users look for in a work machine. Like Tsai, as another prospective MacBook Pro buyer, I too am afraid of possible surprises (and compromises) in the upcoming MacBook Pro line, like the disappearance of ports and the adoption of that same awful keyboard the retina MacBook features. Will the rumoured new OLED mini-display that replaces the function key row on the keyboard be the foundation of an innovative, I‑can’t-believe-how-I-managed-without-it-so-far functionality, or a gimmick that’ll be cause for new software and UI headaches down the road?

Tsai mentions Schiller’s famous “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass!” quip. Putting it in context, it was delivered during the presentation of the redesigned Mac Pro at WWDC 2013. A Mac Pro that has not received any kind of update since then. A machine packed with interesting solutions and engineering and manufacturing feats, yet, three years after, I have to ask “What’s the plan, here?” — because every Mac Pro user I’ve talked with has told me they find the previous Mac Pro design more practical and thought-out than the 2013 miniaturisation. (Yes, one could say the same for the Power Mac G4 Cube, but at least the Cube was not the only Power Mac G4 available at the time.)

The progression of Apple’s innovation, during the second Steve Jobs era, felt like the product of a plan with the occasional stumbling blocks along the way. Currently, such progression feels more like the product of an aggregation of mostly interesting ideas getting to a plan through a trial-and-error process. 

Back to Tsai, he then quotes Nick Heer:

It doesn’t really matter whether there’s a real decline in Apple’s software quality, or if it’s mostly an exaggeration bolstered by a larger user base and increased media coverage. What is concerning is the sentiment I perceive in Cue’s explanation — that a bug affecting 1% of users is comparable in 2016 to one affecting 1% of users in, say, 2006 or 1996. But, as he says, there’s an enormous chasm in the actual number of users affected, and that’s what’s particularly concerning. If Apple is pushing out, to be generous, one-quarter of the number of these bugs as they were ten years ago, that means that they’re still affecting orders of magnitude more users.

and concludes:

My perception is that it’s not just the larger user base. I personally encounter a lot more Apple bugs than I used to.

I do too. And I also agree that it’s not just the larger user base. If you look back at the past decade, 2000–2010, if you search Mac forums’ archives, you’ll find plenty of complaints from regular users. You’ll always find regular Mac users complaining of what they call ‘bugs’ but which are often problems they stumbled on while configuring (or mis-configuring) something in their setup; or issues caused by third party software acting up but Apple takes the blame anyway; or simply mistakes made by the users themselves due to their inexperience; and so on and so forth. What I think is a more reliable indicator, instead, are the complaints from power users and software developers, because theirs is a subset of users that hasn’t grown at the same order of magnitude as regular users. And what I’ve noticed is more complaints from these people in recent years, with consistent issues that truly are first-party bugs, not temporary setbacks caused by specific hardware/software setups or one-time anomalies that are triggered by particularly esoteric circumstances. 

During the years 1999 to 2005, I used to do a lot of technical assistance on the Mac platform. 95% of the time I was called to troubleshoot a ‘Mac problem’ or a ‘bug’, it turned out to be something caused by bad practices. Typically, the person had installed some dubious or poorly-written free software or hack that wreaked havoc on their Mac, triggering freezes or system conflicts. Or the user had ignored a warning and irretrievably deleted essential files. Or the user had followed the advice of some ‘tech-savvy friend’ to optimise their Mac, mistook the instructions, and ended up trashing documents required by the operating system. The examples are many. But I and other experienced Mac users I knew, with our pristine, finely-tuned systems, rarely encountered problems or bugs so egregious as to make us question what Apple was doing with regard to quality assurance. Today, I find this situation quite changed, and a lot of expert, long-time Mac users complaining about bugs and misbehaviours that can’t be attributed to user error or inexperience. That’s what I perceive to be more alarming.

 

Coda — Since there’s a lot of talking about Apple Maps in the interview with Cue and Federighi by Rick Tetzeli, let me give you a personal update on the matter. I still can’t rely on Apple Maps where I live. There are a lot of businesses that aren’t listed; a fair number of businesses that are listed closed down 2–3 years ago; and the app still can’t find my home address here in Valencia unless I write it down in its most complete form without omissions, otherwise it always suggests similar addresses from towns nearby. Google Maps is infinitely better, more accurate, with more pertinent suggestions and ‘educated guesses’ — and I use it without ever being logged into my Google account.

The great disconnect

September 2, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

IMG 1492

– So, what did you do while on holiday?

– Mostly nothing.

– Seriously? So what, you just killed time?

– Yes and no. It was great. I’ll elaborate.

 

I reached the end of July in a sorry state. Sleep-deprived, overworked, anguished by deadlines; both the ‘hard’ deadlines related to work assignments I had to deliver, and the ‘soft’ deadlines I routinely self-impose for my writing projects. I had to publish a new issue of Vantage Point magazine before going on holiday, even if it was just a ‘Single Special’. I had to write Episode 4 of my series Off The Grid (no, I still haven’t published it, but it’s coming soon.) I had to publish a Kindle version of both Volume 1 and 2 of Minigrooves, my ongoing collection of short stories (and I did, check this post)…

I had to do this, I had to do that. I managed to do most of this and that in time, and barely retain my sanity, but I felt I went very close to experiencing the dreaded burnout.

“This summer, holidays will be different,” I told myself and my wife, “I really, really need to stop, recharge, retool.”

I decided to leave the MacBook Pro, my main work machine, at home. My luggage would consist of clothes, a couple of film cameras, three iPhones, my iPad, a couple of notebooks to keep taking notes for my Low Fidelity novel, nothing else. (I can see your eyes widen as you read three iPhones, but I had to take with me my main iPhone 5 with the Spanish SIM, my old iPhone 3G with the Italian SIM to use while in Italy, and a SIM-less iPhone 4 so that I could insert a second Italian SIM with a generous data plan that I use every time I visit my parents. They don’t have a landline, so I use the iPhone 4 as a personal hotspot to bring Internet to the other devices my wife and I use while on holiday.)

As I planned what to take with me, it was clear that, despite my wishes to disconnect and enjoy some offline time, I wanted to be able to access the Internet to keep following tech news, blogs and the usual stuff, though certainly at a more leisurely pace. This is the typical halo effect of today’s ‘always-on’ mentality and lifestyle. The need to stay in the loop at all costs.

The generous data plan I mentioned before gives you 10 GB of traffic at high cellular speed for a month. If you use all that up before the month is over, you don’t get charged for any additional traffic, you can still navigate at the glacial speed of 32kbps. 

My wife and I made a terrible mistake, a mistake I’m almost embarrassed to share, given that I consider myself a seasoned, tech-savvy person. We both left Automatic App Updates activated on all our devices (three iPhones and two iPads). The result: we burnt through 10 GB of data in a little more than a week. The 10 GB offer would renew a couple of days before our return home. My wife begrudgingly managed without the high connection speed and with having Internet to the very bare minimum. I soon realised I didn’t care at all.

I thought the so-called ‘fear of missing out’ would kick in soon, but nothing. The only thing I did was to check my email every two-three days because I couldn’t afford not to, but for the rest, I really didn’t care I was basically cut off from any online activity. I read books, played Mahjong, took some photos, wrote a bit, enjoyed the company of my wife and my parents, enjoyed the occasional excursion, but mostly I rested. My mind needed rest. 

Was I worried that my presence on social media was getting scarce, possibly leading to drop of attention and followers? No. There are more important things in life. There are your parents, both with health problems, both needing help in a way or another. There is the realisation that you get to visit them mostly once a year, for three weeks, and that this is not going to last for long. The realisation that when you say goodbye the day you’re leaving, who knows, it may be the last time you see one of them, or both. So you give priority to spending some quality time with them.

Was I worried that the unread count in my RSS feed reader would soon increase and get out of control? Not really. Lots of articles are idle speculation on future devices; or a‑few-lines commentary after some news bits that cease to be worth exploring faster than the time it would take me to catch up on them; or podcast episode announcements; or lists of iOS/Mac apps of the week, deals and accessories; and so on and so forth. In the end, I can read all the stuff that really matters in my feeds in about two afternoons.

Was I worried that, by neglecting my own projects for a while, they would lose relevance and whatever interest I’d managed to raise about them would quickly fade away? Not really, for two reasons: the first is that my own writing and projects will never lose relevance for me, no matter how long a hiatus I take from them. The second is that — sadly, quite sadly — the interest I have indeed managed to raise about them has been so little, that there isn’t even the perception I have been ‘losing ground’, if you get my drift. I have noticed that, no matter how my writing in general is appreciated, when I start promoting my fiction it’s like talking about astrophysics at a party among drunk law students — either people turn a deaf ear, or they look at you funny. Or they don’t even register what you’re saying.

I’m not saying it’s not worth taking care of my projects and products. I’m just realising that something must be wrong with the way I advertise them or the way I approach their promotion. Maybe I’m not annoying enough. Maybe I should work on first creating connections with a few prominent people (as far as online presence and influence go), then expand my reach with their help. Maybe I keep trying to convince the wrong audience, people who are simply only interested in my tech-related writing and could not care less about my fiction. (But Matt Gemmell proves that a tech-oriented audience can indeed be interested in reading a novel written by a developer-recently-turned-writer — as for me, I’ve been writing fiction for 26 years!)

I’m digressing. My point is, I wasn’t worried about my projects and products losing traction while I was offline, because I’m planning some changes for the upcoming months anyway, so there wasn’t and isn’t anything to worry about. People will not magically start caring anyway, so making changes and redefining approaches is up to me.

During my time away from the Internet, what I did was mostly nothing, but it was the best nothing I experienced in a long time. It was a space that soon gave way to deep introspection. I thought about my routine, both the general daily routine — when I go to sleep, when I get up, how much time I spend at the computer or before a screen during the day, etc. — and the routine inside that time I spend at the computer. And there isn’t a better time than when you’re completely removed from such routine, that you can zoom out and take a better look at it. And you start noticing little silly things, like the amount of effort and energies you must invest to keep up-to-date with what goes on in technology (and many other disciplines) today, to then be able to add your voice to that cauldron of a debate, which keeps getting bigger every day and you end up drowning in irrelevancy most of the time anyway. 

Writing online today, no matter how often you ‘show up’, often feels like a permanent state of paying one’s dues. Authority is achieved randomly: the public doesn’t seem to care if you’ve written about technology for the past 12 years or for just a few weeks. If the right people link to your piece and appreciate it, it’s a brilliant contribution and you’re worthy of attention, at least for a few days. You soon find out that you’re organising your approach to follow that model, so you read a lot, write a lot (quantity and ‘showing up’ frequency over quality), and every day you sit at your computer or mobile device and you’ve basically become a hamster spinning in your wheel. When you’re in your twenties and full of energy and passion and enthusiasm, this is fine. You may even have successfully found a way to monetise it — good for you. When you’re in your forties, have been doing it since your late twenties, and your efforts never seem to be enough, no matter how much quality you put in what you produce, your enthusiasm… gets reconfigured.

In this scenario, a disconnect is useful to understand that you have to stop being manipulated by the Internet and social media’s mechanisms. The worry related to how irrelevant the Internet makes you feel has to go away. The ‘fear of missing out’ is bullshit. The first time I accessed my Twitter timeline on the iPhone when I returned home, it felt as if nothing had changed. And nothing did. The same kinds of tweets: political satire, stupid nitpicking about first world problems, the same old banter, the same kind of meaningless memes, snarky remarks and subtweets, etc. etc. The first promoted tweet I saw was for some kind of product or service and began as follows: “Work from anywhere with this…” — another trap of this ‘always-on’ lifestyle. Working from anywhere might be convenient for certain people, but if you stop and think hard about it for a moment, it’s insane. These lines dividing work and leisure/time off, getting progressively more blurred to the point of disappearing, are creating a ridiculous, energy-sucking lifestyle. I don’t want to work from anywhere. I don’t want to bring technological gadgets everywhere so that I may do something work-related no matter what time it is or even if I’m technically on holiday. This blending of work/leisure feels more and more unhealthy to me. It’s like wearing a VR headset most of the time. It may be a fun experience when it’s on and you’re sucked in. But who are you, what are you when you remove it and realise just how exhausted you are? And was it really worthwhile?

My recent disconnect was bigger than anticipated, bigger than what I wanted, but turned out to be exactly what I needed at this juncture. I have realised that sometimes you have to get to a particular stage to fully understand how you need to ‘reboot’. In my case, the key was the realisation that I needed to truly stop caring about a series of aspects, mechanisms, and false problems related to the online sphere. To reach a sort of detachment that should be extremely useful in redefining my approach from now on.

The Minigrooves Project and Volume 2

July 20, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Et Cetera

Minigrooves V1+V2

 

Volume 2 now available

After three years since the publication of Volume 1, Minigrooves Volume 2 is finally available on the iBooks Store, and will be available for the Kindle platform as well before the end of July. (Update, 26 July — Both Volume 1 and 2 are available on the Kindle Store, check the Relevant Links at the end of the post.)

Here’s a direct iTunes link: Minigrooves — Volume 2

Volume 2 of Minigrooves includes the 23 short stories of the Project’s second cycle that first ‘aired’ online from June 2013 to March 2015, plus a story I added later during the editing process. As for the Extras, you’ll find:

  • Annotations: trivia and minutiæ about many of the stories.
  • Alternate takes: different endings of some of the featured stories.
  • An interview about Minigrooves: In March 2015, Alex Roddie interviewed me about the Minigrooves Project and the stories included in Volume 1.

You can download a free sample with 2 full short stories.

Requirements: To view this book, you must have an iOS device with iBooks 1.5 or later and iOS 4.3.3 or later, or a Mac with iBooks 1.0 or later and OS X 10.9 or later. 

A new layout

Minigrooves layout differences

 

Volume 2 has been published with considerable delay. The second cycle of the short stories ended in March 2015, and I originally planned to publish the book around May 2015. Of course, for consistency’s sake, Volume 2 had to inherit the layout of Volume 1, but to be honest I wasn’t exactly satisfied with that. After two years, that original layout started to feel dated, and the book’s interface and user interaction were in need of an improvement. 

Due to my inexperience — and in part to iBooks Author’s quirks — when I assembled the first edition of Volume 1, I created an ebook whose format, in Apple’s parlance, is a ‘Multi-touch iBook’. This format is more appropriate when you want to produce ebooks with interactive features, not a traditional book with just formatted text. As a consequence, the original Volume 1 of Minigrooves offered a decent reading experience on the iPad and the Mac, but not on the iPhone or iPod touch; and even on an iPad or a Mac the navigation was admittedly a bit awkward. On top of that, when I tried converting the book for the Kindle platform, the task turned out to be unnecessarily daunting and frustrating. After a few months I just gave up.

So, when I started working on Volume 2 in iBooks Author, I decided to create a more compatible ePub publication, with a cleaner, simpler layout that could be more easily ported to the Kindle. But again, for consistency’s sake, that meant publishing a new edition of Volume 1 as well, with the same layout, and new covers that would better display how these books belong to the same series. 

That’s the reason for Volume 2’s delay — I was essentially putting together two books.

Lessons learnt

The first volume of short stories was an ambitious first step. I poured a lot of work into it, and offered a fair amount of extras. The feedback has been disappointing overall — meaning there has been very little feedback to begin with. It’s hard to interpret silence. However, what little feedback I did receive was quite important in making me understand a few things, and the changes and course corrections I’ve set for Volume 2 and the Minigrooves Project in general all take into account the constructive criticism I have received over time.

Essentially, from what people implied in comments or told me explicitly, the main issues to be addressed were these:

  • The ebook’s interface was nice, but could have been better.
  • At $9.99/€8.99, Volume 1 was perceived to be too expensive for an ebook.
  • Some perceived 42 stories to be too many, and the book a bit overwhelming overall.[1]
  • The lack of a Kindle version was seen by many prospective readers as a deal-breaker.

The new Volume 1 and Volume 2 of Minigrooves:

  • Have an improved, more reader-friendly layout.
  • Feature a much reduced price — they cost $1.99/€1.99 each.
  • Will be available for the Kindle very soon.
  • Volume 2 includes ‘only’ 24 short stories (but they’re on average a bit longer than the stories included in Volume 1) and feels less overwhelming a book.

An important detail about the updated Volume 1

I originally planned to push the update of Minigrooves Volume 1 through the iBooks Store, so that people who purchased the first edition could automatically receive the update on their devices, just like it happens with regular iOS apps. Unfortunately, iTunes Producer returned a series of errors, basically telling me that the update was too extensive to be processed as a simple, minor update. Also, apparently it’s not possible to update an ebook originally published in the ‘Multi-touch iBook’ format with a new ePub file.

What I had to do at that point — and believe me, I’m not happy with it — was to remove the old version of Volume 1 from sale, and upload the updated files and metadata as a new ebook. This means that if you purchased the first edition of Volume 1 and want to take advantage of the new, more readable layout of the updated edition, you’ll have to purchase the ebook again. In other words, if this were an iOS app, it would be a paid update. On the one hand, the new version only costs $1.99; on the other hand, if you really truly feel I’m ripping you off, get in touch with me and I should be able to offer you a promo code. But only if you purchased the first edition of the ebook and don’t want to purchase the updated edition. 

A few relevant links

Thank you!

Thank you to all those who have encouraged me ever since the Minigrooves Project started, gave feedback and linked to it via Twitter.

Thank you to all those who showed interest towards my stories, and who have helped spread the word over time.

Thank you to those who have purchased the books or genuinely plan to. If you want to support my writing, this is a great way to do so.

If you purchased Minigrooves and liked the stories, please tell other people about the project, recommend the books, write a brief review, give feedback. This is highly appreciated.

And as always, thanks for reading!

 

  • 1. Despite my repeatedly saying that one can read Minigrooves in a non-sequential manner, that you can just open the book and read one story when you want and when you have time, I have the feeling that the overall impression has been, Whoa, that’s a lot. I’ll never finish this. ↩︎

 

Primary OS and unfair comparisons

June 25, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

In The Primary OS Ben Brooks once again extols the virtues of going iOS-only. And I, once again, reiterate my stance on the matter: if it works for you, if adapting your workflows to it is manageable and not burdensome, go for it and more power to you. But I really believe it’s not necessary to put the other OS, the Mac, in a bad light just to reinforce how great a decision you made in leaving it behind.

With regard to Brooks’ specific article I’m liking to, I notice an unfair comparison between a neglected Mac with the first beta of Mac OS Sierra installed on it, and an iOS system that is up-to-date and used all the time every day.

I can manage everything from my iPad, but sometimes it’s just faster with my MacBook, so I grabbed that after a few minutes troubleshooting on my iPad Pro. But I failed to type my password twice, Terminal then crashed out on me. Then Safari froze. Then I had to just give up on the Mac and restart it. It could be macOS Sierra which is on the Mac, or it could be that I never use my Mac and so the system was in a state of “oh shit, anyone remember how do this stuff?”

Or it can be both things, and more. Failing to type your password is hardly the Mac’s fault. The Terminal crashing and Safari freezing really sounds like a typical issue with beta software (Terminal never crashed on me in 15 years of using Mac OS X, and the last time Safari froze on my Mac was under Mavericks — and it was one website’s fault). So yes, you can’t expect a neglected machine running a beta version of Mac OS to be instantly ready when an emergency occurs.

I lost 30 minutes to just managing my Mac that morning.

It’s okay. Once I lost about 45 minutes in iOS just trying to figure out a way to edit a bunch of RTF files I had put in the cloud. It also cost me some money, as I purchased apps that seemed to do the job but weren’t satisfactorily up to the task.

Yet my iPad was just there, did it’s [sic] job and stayed the hell out of my way, and never once demanded I do housekeeping on it. The apps update in the background. The devices backs up each night automatically. It’s just always ready to go. That’s simply not the case with my Mac.

Technically, certain ‘housekeeping’ can be disregarded on the Mac if you’re in a hurry or there’s an emergency. There’s no need to follow an app’s prompt to update to the latest version. The one currently installed is likely to do its job all the same. Update requests can be dismissed. Clearing up Notification Centre can be postponed, since it’s out of the way by default. And apps can update in the background on the Mac too — at least those purchased in the Mac App Store. Using Time Machine, the Mac can be backed up every hour. Using services like CrashPlan or BackBlaze you can schedule backups at night. Sure, in the catastrophic case you have to restore from a remote backup, since Macs have bigger storage, the process is going to be long and tedious. But restoring a 128 GB iOS device from an iCloud backup isn’t exactly lightning fast either.

My Mac is always ready to go. When I wake it from sleep I can resume work exactly where I left it in more than one application. Everything’s there, in the apps and documents I left open before grabbing the Mac to continue my work elsewhere.

My primary OS is Mac OS X, and for my work and the way I work, I don’t expect to leave the Mac anytime soon. But I certainly enjoy doing lighter, simpler tasks on iOS as well, and I’ve been using my iPad every day since I purchased it four years ago. I’ve been trying to use both Mac OS X and iOS in synergy and take advantage of the best of both worlds, because I think they’re quite complementary. However, by choosing the Mac as my primary system, I’m not implying iOS is a shitty environment, nor do I feel the need to draw certain comparisons which, to be honest, appear to be a little contrived and unfair.

 

 

Related: The Mac is just as compelling

After the WWDC 2016 keynote — A few thoughts

June 21, 2016
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

WWDC 2016 header s

 

After major Apple events such as the 2‑hour keynote that took place on 13 June, it’s always hard for me to write an article with my observations; first because — especially in the case of this WWDC 2016 keynote — the event is packed with announcements and news to digest, and secondly because many other good writers are quicker at sharing their thoughts; so when I finally sit down and start writing my contribution, I feel there’s nothing much to add.

Of all the many articles I read this past week, It’s Tim Cook’s Apple Now: What WWDC 2016 Teaches Us About His Vision for the Company by Rick Tetzeli is probably the closest to the kind of piece I was planning to write myself. The following passage in particular:

Perhaps more notably, the keynote made clear that Cook is determined to fix whatever Apple products seem less than stellar, including the Watch, Apple Music, the App Store, and many services dependent on wireless connectivity. That’s a continuation of the company’s longtime focus on spending time and money to continually improve existing products. But the keynote was even more notable because it made clear that Apple’s business concerns and goals are different — and more ambitious and complicated — than the ones Cook inherited from Jobs. Once upon a time, Jobs defined the “Apple experience” as the merging of hardware and software in a single device in a way that no other company could match. Over time, that definition grew to encompass an iPad, a Mac, and an iPhone, and all that a user could accomplish because these were wirelessly connected. Cook is expanding that universe significantly.

While some commentators believe that the company is still focused on individual devices, the keynote was full of improvements devoted to two concepts: continuity and artificial intelligence. The continuity part made clear that Apple wants you to be able to do whatever you need on whichever of its devices you are using. Start a document on a Mac, you can wrap it up on your iPhone. Start editing a slide show on your iPad, finish it up on a Mac or an iPhone. Track your physical activity on a Watch, check it out later on your iPad.

The word that sums up all of this is ecosystem. Apple’s focus is its ecosystem as a whole, a seamless ‘environment’ surrounding the users and offering them a coherent, cohesive experience. This isn’t exactly a new goal, but never before has it been so apparent how Apple wants to have a whole functioning organism rather than just improve each different platform to offer better hardware products. The ‘Apple software quality is declining’ debate of the past months made a lot of people hope that Apple would concentrate on fixing what doesn’t work rather than introduce fancy new features for novelty’s sake. During the WWDC keynote, as Apple executives were outlining some of the key new features of the upcoming versions of watchOS, tvOS, Mac OS and iOS, I easily noticed a common denominator — Apple is introducing new features whose main purpose is to fix some user interface or user interaction annoyances for each of those platforms. And such improvements will not only affect a single platform, but — as Tetzeli points out — they’ll improve and solidify the interconnection between all four of them. For the first time, while watching the keynote, I found myself thinking It’d really be nice to also have an Apple TV and an Apple Watch now, the two Apple devices I usually had a very limited interest in.

The glue of Apple’s ecosystem are cloud services that work behind the scenes to hopefully guarantee that seamless continuity and experience mentioned before. And the impression I had during the keynote is that Apple is showing an increasing confidence in iCloud. 

  • Siri on the Mac means additional work for the underlying services. Some have wondered why Siri didn’t come before on the Mac — I think that perhaps it’s because Apple didn’t feel the underlying infrastructure ready or robust enough.
  • The new Universal Clipboard feature relies on iCloud. (Interestingly this is billed as an iCloud feature rather than a Continuity feature, in which case this would mean that copying data won’t necessary be limited to devices in close proximity, writes Ryan Smith at AnandTech.)
  • Ryan Smith, again, notes that Apple has also expanded iCloud Drive’s functionality a bit, pushing it to a more generic cloud storage solution. For macOS Sierra, iCloud Drive will now be able to sync up the Desktop and Documents folders, moving away from the more application-centric approach it’s best known for. Apple is pitching this as a convenience feature; Mac users who are accustomed to saving files in those locations can now just access them remotely via iCloud as opposed to having to change their workflow to better mesh with how iCloud has traditionally worked.
  • The new Optimised Storage feature in Mac OS Sierra also relies on iCloud for the most part.

All improvements announced at the keynote are welcome. I’m not an Apple Watch user, but the increased speed, UI tweaks, and new apps coming with watchOS 3 are certainly making the watch a more compelling device. Same goes with the AppleTV. I was mainly interested in seeing what’s coming for Mac OS and iOS, and Apple didn’t disappoint in the least. 

That said, there are a few things that, for now, I’m filing under the I’m not sure I like category.

In iOS:

  • I’m ambivalent about the new design of Control Centre. On the one hand, it has improved visually; on the other hand, I don’t like the additional swipe to reach the audio controls. For panels and UI elements that work as overlays, I like things to be quick and simple. Yet iOS 10 seems to be going in the opposite direction.
  • On a similar note, Apple has doubled down on Notification Centre as a centre of activity that’s getting a little too busy for my tastes. I know there are people who are thrilled by being able to do more stuff directly from Notification Centre, but I don’t see the appeal of, for instance, engaging in an iMessage conversation right from the lock screen (while I admit it’s convenient for quick yes/no replies). Sure, the 3D Touch enhancements let you interact with notifications in a powerful way, but things aren’t going to be equally handy for those with an iPhone lacking 3D Touch. It’s a personal preference, of course. I just like notifications to be ‘passive’ and just a shortcut to launch the relevant app and do stuff inside the app. Today’s iPhones are incredibly fast devices — I don’t see how doing everything in Notification Centre is this huge time-saver. It’s a matter of habits, I guess.
  • I understand the disappearance of the historical Slide to Unlock gesture. Rise to Wake and pressing the Home button to unlock the device are both gestures that make a lot of sense and, in a way, unify the unlocking behaviour for everyone — whether one’s iPhone has Touch ID or not. Still I’m in full agreement with Michael Rockwell when he writes: Two changes that I just know will annoy me for a few months after iOS 10’s release is that they’ve moved Today View and the quick access camera gesture on the lock screen. Today View has been moved, spatially, to the left of the lock screen while the camera is to the right of it — swiping from either direction slides the corresponding feature into view. I can already see myself unintentionally accessing Notification Center or Control Center instead of Today View or the camera. Those gestures have become a huge part of the way I interact with my device and it’ll take some time to retrain that muscle memory.
  • For all the talk about the iPad being the future of personal computing, I would have really loved for Apple to showcase at least one iOS feature specially tailored for the iPad, instead of hearing a lot of sentences ending with …And it’s great on the iPad as well.

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    In Mac OS:

  • I know it’s a bit silly, but as a long-time Mac user, I just can’t stomach the macOS spelling. First Apple drops the ‘Mac’ in ‘Mac OS X’ in 2012 because— actually I don’t remember the reason; it probably suited some narrative. Now Apple puts the ‘Mac’ back and drops the ‘X’ because it suits another narrative. I’ll just write Mac OS and to hell with it all.
  • Optimised Storage sounds like an interesting feature on paper, but I really hope it’s not entirely automatic and active by default. That there’s going to be some clear ON/OFF switch like with Time Machine. I don’t know you but, whether it’s new or older files, I’d like to decide where they go and when to move them. Ryan Smith at AnandTech observes that Given the capacities of modern Macs, it goes without saying that to free up any significant amount of space you’d have to move multiple gigabytes’ worth of files to the cloud, so the cloud-hosting aspects of Optimized Storage seem to rely pretty heavily on buying up to a larger storage tier on iCloud. This makes me hopeful about the optional nature of the Optimised Storage feature, and that you can choose not to use it if you don’t want to.
  • The question of Mac OS Sierra’s system requirements is a bit puzzling. If I read the information correctly, Sierra requires processors with the SSE4.1 instruction set, so the minimum requirement becomes the Core 2 Duo ‘Penryn’ CPU. Now the official list of supported Macs states: All late-2009 (and newer) iMac and MacBook computers, and all 2010 (and newer) MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac Mini and Mac Pro computers. But the list of Macs with a Core 2 Duo ‘Penryn’ processor is longer, and includes Mac models that go as far back as early 2008. In my case, for example, my 15-inch MacBook Pro is a 2.66 GHz mid-2009 machine which officially is not supported by Mac OS Sierra, but apart from the graphics card, it has identical specs as the 13-inch mid-2010 MacBook Pro, which is included in the list of supported Macs. My guess is that it’s just a matter of the 7‑year support period Apple guarantees for its machines. When Sierra is released this Autumn, all Macs introduced before late 2009 will be more than 7 years old, and their status will change to ‘Vintage’ for Apple Support. I have to update my MacBook Pro anyway, so I’m not really bummed, but I suspect there will be a few machines which technically can run Sierra even if they’re not officially supported. It’ll be interesting to see whether the Mac OS Sierra Installer will let users proceed anyway or just display a warning like Mac OS Sierra cannot be installed on this Mac. (There will be hacks, I’m sure.)

Overall, I enjoyed the WWDC keynote, and I can’t wait to see the new Mac OS and iOS in action. All these new features in software are also making me anxious to see the new hardware Apple will introduce in the next months. I own aging devices by now (mid-2009 Mac, an iPad 3, an iPhone 5), and while I can’t complain about their continued dependability and usefulness, I really wish I could upgrade all of them in one fell swoop. But for how I work, the Mac always has precedence, and the hardware design and connections of the next MacBook Pros will largely influence my choices for the upgrade. If they end up being too similar to the 12-inch retina MacBook, I may even consider switching to a desktop machine or to the more affordable MacBook Air (provided Apple will maintain the Air’s current keyboard design, which I clearly prefer over the ultra-flat keyboard design of the retina MacBook).

To conclude, I believe we’re entering a phase where Apple is building a truly compelling ecosystem — not just from a hardware/software integration standpoint, but also considering Apple’s privacy-first approach. When I look at the alternatives, I think Apple’s a great platform to be locked in today.