The Mac can’t do it all — really?

March 25, 2014
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

I realise I may have fallen into the linkbait trap. I’m usually good at avoiding this kind of stuff, but this morning, when I spotted on Flipboard How I Moved Away From The Mac After Leaving Apple, a piece written by David Sobotta for ReadWrite, I kept reading because the article presented itself as a long-form writeup of what sounded like an interesting perspective on Apple — that of a former employee of the company and long-time Mac user.

Instead, I ended up rather astounded by what read like a rather shallow, subjective and somewhat embittered report from someone who — despite writing Take it from someone who knows Apple inside and out… in the very subheading of the piece — doesn’t seem to ultimately understand Apple much. I agree with Grant Hutchinson when he says that the article “just highlights the backwardness of entrenched industries and legacy systems… not issues with the Mac platform.”

I know: the article is about a subjective experience, and its subjective stance is clearly worded in the title itself. Still, I expected something with more depth than what can be summarised as “I had to enter more Windows-friendly environments for work reasons, plus I had back luck with the Apple hardware I bought, plus I didn’t like how Apple addressed my hardware problems, plus I never really had issues when I started using Windows, so yay Windows/Microsoft and boo Apple.” I mean, this is the kind of user experience tale I’ve heard many times back when I used to frequent online forums, mailing lists and the like. Back when the Mac vs PC wars were raging and the majority of opinions and experiences came from users who used their very personal anecdotes as a measure of a platform’s worth. 

From Sobotta’s piece I expected a more balanced and in-depth analysis of the factors that may drive a user away from the Mac, for example. The article seems to present itself as a sort of cautionary tale, but, in my opinion, is too strongly tied to specific and circumstantial issues (to use Sobotta’s words) to have the exemplary value it probably seeks. It also fails to convincingly demonstrate what it announces in its premise — i.e. that the Mac “can’t do it all.”

Another minor thing, but still worth mentioning, I take issue with, is the way the author uses links to its personal blog in certain points of the article. There are parts in the article where Sobotta is vague, or makes certain statements that require further explanation. Indeed, he uses links to his personal blog as a way to better explain the issue he’s talking about, but often these posts on his blog don’t really explain matters. Furthermore, they are long posts which the average reader probably tends to skip. The result is that issues remain vague and certain statements remain largely unexplained. 

For example, at a certain point Sobotta explains that, after years of using (and liking) iPhoto, “in summer 2011, problems with iPhoto caused me to pull the plug on my favorite Macintosh application, iPhoto, altogether.” Now, ‘problems with iPhoto’ is vague, but there’s a link to his blog (to be honest, I expected a link to some other site or discussion forum explaining what exactly those problems were, but I’m digressing) so maybe I’ll find an explanation there, I thought. After reading that long aside, however, the only thing I understood is that Sobotta had a library-related issue after updating to iPhoto 9.1.5. Even in that blog post things are described rather vaguely:

The last week of July 2011, I did a routine software update on the MacBook. It included iPhoto 9.1.5.

When I launched iPhoto after the software update, it told me my library needed to be updated. It started and never finished. Relaunching iPhoto got me nowhere so I searched the web for some solutions. I tried a few which did not seem to work. I even tried creating a new library, and iPhoto 9.1.5 still did not work.

Then I dug out my DVD and re-installed iPhoto 9 from scratch. I then applied the software updates and got the same non-functioning results. 

The feeling I have after reading this is that Sobotta gave up rather quickly. And that he’s also quick at passing judgment with considerations like: What bothers me about the iPhoto problem is that it is just another glitch that is making me wonder if Apple is stretched a little too thin. (Just a few paragraph after the quoted bit.) By the way, in the same post he gives up on iMovie in much the same rushed way: I wasn’t one of the folks who hated the big change in iMovie. I got so that I liked it, but recently after several unsuccessful tries at uploading movies to YouTube from iMovie, I gave up on iMovie.

Back to the ReadWrite article, here are a few highlights that made me raise an eyebrow, to use an euphemism:

Fast forward to late 2012 — my office gets its latest technology refresh. The first product I buy is a first-generation Lenovo Yoga, the second is an I5 Lenovo desktop, and the third is a Mac mini, which is really more of a token Mac than anything else. 

This belittling mention of the Mac mini is a bit unwarranted, I think. It may have been an underpowered machine back in its first PowerPC and Intel Core Solo iterations, but by the end of 2012 the Mac mini was already a rather powerful desktop Mac. Don’t believe me? Ask the guys at Macminicolo or Brett Terpstra, just to make a couple of examples off the top of my mind.

I ordered an Intel MacBook in 2006 and a 26″ I5 iMac in 2010.

I hope that 26″ is a typo…

By early 2010, my wife’s 12″ G4 PowerBook was so slow that even the Washington Post’s minimalist webpage wouldn’t load.

Sorry, sorry, but here is when I call bullshit, loud and clear. As someone who still uses his 12-inch PowerBook G4 purchased in 2004, I have to say that, sure, by today’s standards it is certainly a slow machine and I’d never use it for video conversion or other CPU-intensive tasks, but in 10 years of use I never had issues with… websites. There may be the occasional rendering glitch due to Safari not being updated past version 5.0.6 on Leopard, and YouTube videos stutter (less so if you specify Safari on iPad as user agent), but “so slow” that a webpage “wouldn’t load”? Give me a break.

I had no intention of buying my wife a premium-priced Mac with an outdated processor (the Intel Core 2 Duo) but around that time I saw a special at Staples for HP laptops with the new Intel processors. […] The two HP laptops together cost less than $1,500 and both computers showed up in a few days, even though Apple folks maintained the processors weren’t shipping in any products any time soon. It would take a few months before Apple could announce similar products — which, of course, were also priced much higher.

The Intel Core 2 Duo processor may very well be outdated today in 2014, although my 15″ MacBook Pro with a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU is still quite powerful at many tasks, whether simple or demanding, but in 2010 it was certainly not. I understand the need for some ‘future-proofness’ when buying a new computer, but if Sobotta’s wife was still using a PowerBook G4 in 2010, I deduce that CPU performance was not at the top of her list when choosing a new computer.

Then there’s that remark about Apple laptops being “priced much higher,” which is really becoming rather old. 

The Apple addict I am, I eventually relapsed in the fall of 2010 and ordered an I5 iMac […] but that particular computer is when the wheels really started coming off the Apple wagon.

The iMac and I never hit it off. I had to buy the huge 26″ model to get an I5 processor and I hated the positioning of the SD slot right under the DVD slot.

Again with that 26″. I’m starting to believe it’s not a typo after all… Also, the fact that Sobotta hated the positioning of the SD slot doesn’t make it a lesser machine and isn’t an inherent shortcoming, but obviously just a personal peeve. 

When I went to buy a travel laptop in late 2012, I could not find a Mac that had an integrated SD card for under $1,000. So, I bought an I5 Lenovo Yoga for $999 (which comes with a bonus—a touchscreen), as well as a $479 Lenovo desktop to run all of my photo editing tools and applications like Lightroom and Picasa.

What Sobotta did there is something I witnessed other people do. They don’t want to spend, say, $1,000–1,200 for a Mac, but they spend more on two cheap Windows PCs (or a PC and an Android tablet) and still feel they made a cost-effective purchase. Sobotta didn’t want to spend more than $1,000 for a Mac, but ended up spending $1,478 for two PCs when probably the more cost-effective solution was to purchase a 13-inch MacBook Air for $1,199 — the price of the entry level 1.8 GHz Core i5 mid-2012 model with 128GB of flash storage and equipped with an SD slot. It didn’t have a fancy touchscreen display (to do what, exactly?) but could have run applications like Lightroom and Picasa equally well. 

But if you’re looking for a Mac for $1,000 and then end up spending $1,478, I guess that money isn’t really the issue here. A different story would have been if Sobotta was looking to purchase two computers, had a $1,500 budget, and concluded that he couldn’t buy a laptop and a desktop Mac for that price. That would have been more understandable. 

I still use the Macintosh for certain things but I have to admit being a Mac user has become too much trouble.

Again, a bold remark, linked to a post on Sobotta’s personal blog. Another long post that ultimately doesn’t explain why being a Mac user has become too much trouble. What he says there basically revolves around this statement: Even with a history of good experiences with Apple’s high end systems, my experience with the iMac and MacMini leaves me a little skeptical of the new Mac Pro. Here and there you can find mysterious remarks such as: I have not been happy with OS X and its default world of iCloud for a while. (What does “its default world of iCloud” mean, exactly? He paints a picture of OS X as if it weren’t possible to use without iCloud, which is not strictly true.)

My most recent Kindle book, 100 Pictures, 1000 Words, A Crystal Coast Year, was written and compiled in Microsoft Word on my Lenovo desktop running Windows 8.1. The images were all catalogued and edited using Lightroom on my Windows desktop. I still needed my Mac for a few things — I resized all my images on Pixelmator and edited the filtered HTML for the Kindle using TextWrangler — but many of these things could have been easily done on Windows. 

Actually, I’d like to point out that this workflow could have been more efficiently carried out on a Mac in its entirety. A Mac can indeed run applications like Microsoft Word and Lightroom, in case you were wondering.

Towards the end of the article, Sobotta admits that

Many of the issues I’ve experienced are specific and circumstantial…

Then proceeds to make a sweeping generalisation:

The other issue with Apple, to me, is its attitude. I would’ve felt better about my failing products if Apple was willing to repair the problems. […] What’s worse is that Apple’s poor attitude towards hardware issues rubs off on its customers.

Again, since he had hardware issues with his Macs and had a problem with Apple’s attitude (it would have been interesting to know more about this: maybe I missed it but why was Apple unwilling to repair the problems? What happened, specifically?) — he talks about this ‘poor attitude towards hardware’s issues’ as if Apple had such attitude by default, everywhere, with everybody. Which is not the case. 

Amidst the series of problems that ensued with nearly every Mac I purchased over the years, I still hung to Apple’s platform. But for some reason, there are a number of Mac users out there that will blame you for the problem, regardless what it is, and heap shame upon you for suggesting the world’s richest company should solve a hardware/software problem that you caused. It is radically different mindset from the worlds of Windows or Linux, where most people tend to relate to your problems and end up blaming Microsoft, or perhaps the hardware manufacturer.

This is another generalisation and — again — has nothing to do with Apple as a platform. It’s neither a software-related issue, nor a hardware-related issue, not even an ecosystem-related issue. Honestly, the perceived mentality of the users of a platform shouldn’t be a factor in deciding whether to keep being a user of such platform or to leave it behind. 

Maybe I just know too much about Apple and its products to be able to enjoy the taste these days.

If I have to be blunt, judging by what I’ve read in this article and the linked blog posts, the impression I’m left with is that Sobotta doesn’t know that much about Apple, doesn’t really get how Apple operates, fails to explain why “the Mac can’t do it all,” and why today “being a Mac user has become too much trouble.” All this in a piece filed under the Infrastructure category. It boggles the mind.

8 ridiculous gigabytes

March 19, 2014
by Riccardo Mori
Software

App usage

It appears that Apple yesterday introduced a new iPhone 5c with 8GB of storage. CNN Money writes that “The 8 GB edition will only be available in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia and China.” I won’t discuss this move from a strategical or financial standpoint — though I still think that at £429, versus the £469 for the 16GB version, it’s still too expensive a model. No, what I want to point out is that, today, offering a device like the iPhone with just 8GB of internal storage is simply ridiculous. It could work if the App Store didn’t exist, but let’s be frank here: 8GB are barely manageable once you put music on the device and start shooting photos and videos.

The picture above is the current Settings > General > Usage screen from my 16GB iPhone 4. Those are the apps that occupy the most space on the phone. Note that I still haven’t put back some of the music I removed before installing iOS 7.1 (before I had 1.5GB worth of music). If my 16GB iPhone 4 has an actual 13.5GB available out of the box, we can assume that a 8GB iPhone will have roughly 6GB of actual storage available to the user. Look at the picture above once again. If you calculate how much space those apps take up combined, you’ll have a total of almost 4.4GB. The same situation on a 8GB iPhone would be even less manageable.

A lot of iOS apps are quite lightweight on average, but have a tendency to grow in size when you use them regularly. That’s because they start accumulating data, documents, caches, etc. Hipstamatic, taken alone, weighs less than 40MB, but when you start buying and downloading new packs of lenses/filters, the app takes up more and more space. Hipstamatic also stores the photos you take in its own camera roll. You can keep its size under control by periodically deleting the photos from its camera roll (if you auto-save them to the iPhone’s Camera Roll). Same goes for apps like VSCOcam, KitCam and Camera+. I do that every now and then, and I have a 16GB iPhone. On an 8GB iPhone, if you like to take photos and use different third-party photo apps, you’d have to perform this kind of maintenance constantly, and it’s not fun. Also, the 8‑megapixel iPhone 5c camera shoots photos & videos with better resolution than the 5‑megapixel camera of my iPhone 4, thus taking up more space. 

Other apps are a bit more difficult to manage. As far as I know, there’s no direct way to prevent Spotify from bloating. I guess those 365MB (almost 900MB on my iPad 3) are cached data for the most part, and so far the only way I’ve found to eliminate such cache has been to manually delete and reinstall the app. 

And even if you don’t shoot a lot of photos and videos (come on, now, you buy an iPhone 5c and you don’t take photos?), even if you keep your music library to a minimum, what about other things like podcasts, books, dictionaries, drawing apps? What about games? Some of the best games for iOS take up a lot of space. I had to eventually get rid of a couple of games because together they took up more than 2 gigabytes.

An 8GB iPhone 5c with roughly 6GB of actual available space is simply a crippled device if you ask me. And with those prices, it’s just too expensive to make sense. It’s time to make 32GB the default option, and go up to 64 and 128GB, and keep the 16GB as the ’emerging markets’ version. And to increase the 5GB offered with iCloud free accounts, but that’s another story.

Geek. Not chic.

March 18, 2014
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Craig Hockenberry has written a truly insightful article, Wearing Apple, analysing how Apple could approach the category of wearable devices. The steps in Hockenberry’s reasoning leading to his conclusion that Apple may introduce a ‘ring’ rather than a ‘watch’ (in quotes because those would be more than just a ring or just a watch) are sound and logical. What Hockenberry writes in The Product section of his piece makes a lot of sense. 

Still, I think that a ring would be even more difficult to market, no matter how smart or ‘Apple-designed’ it can be. 

Importance and meaning

A ring is a traditionally symbolic object to wear. I’m aware of the dangers of anecdotal evidence, but most people I know don’t wear rings lightly. Whatever the amount of rings they wear, each one is there for a reason, each one is there because it means something. What you wear on your finger is typically more important than what you wear on your wrist or neck. It feels more intimate. Entering this space with a technological device is not impossible, but I have the feeling it’s a minefield. I also have the feeling it would appeal to a rather limited demographic/target — the intersection of young and geeky people. What about other people outside of this demographic? And whatever this Apple smart-ring can offer, it doesn’t sound strong enough to make (these) people wear such a device. It could actually prove easier and more practical to make them wear something on their wrists.

Permanence

Together with intimacy, a ring is usually associated with permanence. A lot of people don’t wear watches all day, and most people don’t wear watches 24/7. I’ve never worn rings, and when I got married I remember struggling with having to wear my wedding ring, I really had to get physically accustomed with its presence, knowing full well how meaningful it was and what represents. After a few months, my wedding ring became part of me, and today I don’t even notice its presence. I bet a lot of tech companies would love people to wear smart wearables permanently, devices that just ‘disappear’ after a while. But I’m not that sure regular people want this. I think they would prefer something they feel they can remove anytime they want. I think that for them to accept a piece of technology in such an intimate, meaningful place, it has to be a really, really compelling device. I’ll use the same Tim Cook quote cited by Hockenberry:

To convince people they have to wear something, it has to be incredible. If we asked a room of 20-year olds to stand up if they’re wearing a watch, I don’t think anyone would stand up.

And yes, maybe if we asked a room of 20-year olds to stand up if they’re wearing a ring, more people would stand up, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they would be glad to have a smart-ring on their fingers. And if they were, it would be interesting to try the same experiment with a room of 30-year olds and 40-year olds. True, nobody’s saying that a smart-ring has to be worn permanently — you could wear it just when you need it and take it off when you don’t. But again, that’s not how people typically view rings. They see a ring and think ‘permanence,’ ‘intimacy,’ ‘on my finger,’ and do they want that thing that vibrates, tracks, communicates its presence (and your presence) there on their finger? Hmmm. I don’t know.

Geek. Not chic.

Do you remember that famous 1998 advertisement for the first iMac model? Its tag line was Chic. Not geek., indicating how that new Mac wasn’t simply technologically advanced, but also something stylish to look at and to have. In judging wearable ideas, solutions, mockups, actual products, I mentally reverse that tag line and it works every time. The Pebble, the Samsung Gear, you name it. Imagine an ad that says ‘Geek. Not chic.’ for these devices — it works. Hockenberry’s idea of an Apple smart-ring is great and well thought-out, but it still retains a geeky essence:

[This wearable device could support iBeacon.] Let this sink in for a second: your wearable device is transmitting a signal with a unique identifier that can be picked up by an iOS 7 device. And the proximity detection is sensitive within a few inches. Presumably, this signal could be also be detected on your Mac as well, since they have supported Bluetooth 4.0 since mid-2011.

By wearing this ring on your finger, your devices can know how close you are to them.

This opens up a world of possibilities: imagine the joy we’d all feel when a notification only popped up on the device we’re closest to. Right now my ring finger is hovering over my MacBook Air’s keyboard by 2–3 inches, while the phone in my pocket is over a foot away. Notification Center needs this information.

I read this and ask myself — and ask you: Look around you as you walk down the street. How many people would be so thrilled, so excited by this, as to want to wear a tech ring on their finger? How many people share the problems that this smart-ring solves for Hockenberry and other Apple geeks?

The power of attraction

As I’ve recently emphasised, Marco Arment nails it when he comments:

Apple’s previous blockbusters — Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad — were all in categories that people really wanted, and there was hope of something good existing within what was technically possible. There were halfway decent portable music players before the iPod, and people really wanted portable music players. Same for smartphones and tablets. 

A smart-ring (or smart-watch or smart-wearable) designed to be a companion device of another device in this Digital Hub 2.0 is going to work best (or even only) inside an ecosystem, and I see Hockenberry’s ring working really well if the user already owns a Mac and an iOS device. Every device produced by Apple since Jobs returned in 1997–98 has had a strong power of attraction over people. I’ve seen a lot of people switching to Apple via the iPod, and a fair share of people switching to Apple thanks to the iPhone and the iPad. I don’t see an equally great power of attraction in a ring as Hockenberry describes it — or in any hypothetical Apple smartwatch for that matter. Unless, of course, such device can offer innovative and independent uses. In other words, unless it’s a cool device that 1) has enough standalone functionalities that people may want to purchase it, and 2) teases users by making them realise how so much better it would work if it were used in combination with other Apple devices. 

Too many variables

Throwing out products and see what sticks is not part of Apple’s culture. Apple doesn’t introduce a device lightly and I can only begin to imagine all the challenges they’re facing with the wearables category. Where to wear such a device? What features should it offer? What could make it compelling to the widest possible audience? Can it be used on its own, or is it going to work only in conjunction with another Apple device? Which problems does it solve? Which things can it do better than existing solutions? In what ways could improve people’s lives? (This, I believe, is the question that best captures Apple’s approach to designing new products.) Should it be just an expansion of Apple’s product offerings or should it also entice users of other platforms into switching to Apple’s ecosystem? And how? And so on and so forth.

Getting this product right is extremely difficult and the timing is also crucial, because now more than ever Apple needs to get it right. The anticipation and pressure from the media is reaching a point that a product fiasco at this juncture could have a dramatic impact on Apple. And there are so many variables to consider, which is what makes the wearables category such a risky operation. My guess is as good as yours, but I believe that whatever device Apple introduces, it’s going to be something unassuming at first, something that will make pundits think that Apple’s playing safe. Something that will not feel exactly like a tremendous breakthrough. But that will gather strength, features and scope by iterative refinements. And, of course, that won’t appeal only to geeks.

The difference between a pocket watch and a smartphone

March 15, 2014
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

In his commentary on Craig Hockenberry’s article Wearing Apple[1], Marco Arment sums up exactly what I think about smartwatches, with clear brevity. He concludes:

[Smartwatches]: it’s a category that pundits and the tech media are telling us we want, but I’m not sure enough people really do.

And of course this morning, while flipping through articles on Flipboard, I happen to see this one: Apple understands the difference between a pocket watch and a wrist watch, where the author, after recalling how the wristwatch came in use at the end of the XIX Century “when men in the military started strapping their pocket watches to leather straps around their arms,” writes:

Now fast forward to the iWatch. It isn’t here yet, and we are already reviewing, criticizing, and rejecting it before we have even seen it. Some people say, “I don’t need it. Why would I want an iPhone on my arm?”

I think you will want an iPhone on your arm, and in the beginning it will feel just as awkward as those soldiers must have felt when they first strapped their pocket watches to their wrists. To them, it felt unnecessary and maybe even made them feel a bit self-conscious. But after discovering how much easier it is work time into everything they do, the wrist watch became more than a convenience. It changed the outcome of wars.

And I thought about Marco’s words, quoted above.

The parallelism ‘from pocket watch to wristwatch’ = ‘from smartphone to smartwatch’ doesn’t really work as seamlessly as the author suggests. On the one hand, you have the same object, a watch, that’s made practical by strapping it to your wrist instead of being in your pocket and attached to your trousers or waistcoat. It changes location, but not its inherent functionality.

On the other hand, moving a smartphone from the pocket to the wrist poses multiple design challenges, but in a nutshell you simply can’t have on your wrist the same object you now carry in your pocket, because a smartphone does a thousand things more than a watch. It’s not that simple. Not even for Apple.

And I still think it’s not that essential, either. Why should I want to purchase a necessarily crippled device to wear on my wrist when I can have a full-featured, fully functional one in my pocket? 

(More thoughts about wearables and smartwatches in my article Wearables: thinking aloud.)

 

 

  • 1. Hockenberry’s article is really interesting and insightful, and I’m still mulling over it. I’ll probably write a few observations in the following days. ↩

 

My trick to deal with the redesigned Shift key in iOS 7.1

March 12, 2014
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

One of the most baffling changes in iOS 7.1, you will agree, is the redesigned Shift key in the virtual keyboard. There was nothing wrong with the way it was implemented under iOS 6 and iOS 7.0.x and I honestly can’t think of a reason to justify this change — it just seems so arbitrary. If you want to take a look at a comparison of the changes in the Shift key behaviour under iOS 6, iOS 7.0 and iOS 7.1, read Nick Heer’s impressions in his article Dot One.

Simply put, the new Shift key design is confusing. So I came up with a little trick to instantly tell whether the Shift key is engaged or not. The Caps Lock state remains recognisable in my opinion (the arrow symbol gets ‘underlined’, resembling the Caps Lock key on Apple’s keyboards), so I won’t mention it here.

The trick for me is to look at the Delete key. If Shift and Delete look similar (i.e. they have the same colour scheme), then the Shift key is not engaged. If the Shift key has an inverse colour scheme, then it is engaged.

Light Shift off

Fig. 1 — Keyboard with light theme. Observe the Shift and Delete keys: both have white pictograms on a grey background. This means that the Shift key is OFF.

 

Light Shift on

Fig. 2 — Keyboard with light theme. Here, the Shift key looks inverted if compared with the Delete key. This means that the Shift key is ON.

 

Dark Shift off

Fig. 3 — Keyboard with dark theme. Observe the Shift and Delete keys: both have white pictograms on a dark grey background. This means that the Shift key is OFF.

 

Dark Shift on

Fig. 4 — Keyboard with dark theme. Again, the Shift key looks inverted if compared with the Delete key. This means that the Shift key is ON.

 

I’ve found that since learning to look at the Shift key in connection with the Delete key, I can readily tell in which state the Shift key is at any moment. (I only need a moment to adjust when I use an app that still employs the old iOS 6 keyboard style.) If this doesn’t work for you, iMore offers another suggestion.