By John Gruber
Mary Childs, reporting for The Financial Times 10 months ago:
Bridgewater has chosen former Apple executive Jon Rubinstein as the new co-chief executive of the world’s biggest hedge fund, replacing Greg Jensen as part of a 10-year handover from founder Ray Dalio.
Mr Rubinstein, who also sits on the boards of Amazon.com and Qualcomm, is expected to join Bridgewater in May and to share the co-CEO role with Eileen Murray.
Now:
Bridgewater Associates co-CEO Jon Rubinstein is stepping down and transitioning to an external advisory role in April after 10 months on the job, the firm told clients in a note Wednesday.
“While over the last ten months Jon has helped build a plan to re-design our core technology platform and has brought in a group of extremely talented executives to build out our technology leadership, we mutually agree that he is not a cultural fit for Bridgewater,” Bridgewater founder, chairman, and co-CIO Ray Dalio wrote in the note.
Nice collection of science and research apps for the Mac, at a discount of up to 50 percent. Great apps, great deal.
Jonathan Zdziarski:
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve accepted a position with Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture team, and am very excited to be working with a group of like minded individuals so passionate about protecting the security and privacy of others.
This decision marks the conclusion of what I feel has been a matter of conscience for me over time. Privacy is sacred; our digital lives can reveal so much about us – our interests, our deepest thoughts, and even who we love. I am thrilled to be working with such an exceptional group of people who share a passion to protect that.
“A matter of conscience” is, I think, exactly how Tim Cook feels about this. Great hire for Apple.
Good piece by Josh Clark on the problems with “one true answer” search responses:
Speed is a competitive advantage, and time is considered the enemy in most interfaces. That’s reflected in our industry’s fascination with download and rendering speeds, though those metrics are merely offshoots of the underlying user imperative, help me get this job done quickly. “Performance isn’t the speed of the page,” says Gerry McGovern. “It’s the speed of the answer.”
But it has to be the right answer. While this approach works a treat for simple facts like weather, dates, or addresses, it starts to get hairy in more ambitious topics — particularly when those topics are contentious.
I agree with Clark: this is a design problem. It’s a design mistake if you display the wrong answer in a way that makes it look like it’s certainly correct. It’s not a design mistake if you display that same wrong answer in a way that makes it clear that the answer isn’t certain.
Kirk McElhearn:
Auto-play videos suck. They use bandwidth, and their annoying sounds get in the way when you’re listening to music and open a web page. I happen to write for a website that uses them, and it annoys me to no end. (My editors have no control over those auto-play videos, alas.)
But you can stop auto-play videos from playing on a Mac. If you use Chrome or Firefox, it’s pretty simple, and the plugins below work both on macOS and Windows; if you use Safari, it’s a bit more complex, but it’s not that hard.
Auto-play videos are so user-hostile that there ought to be a way to turn them off without needing an extension or hidden developer preference.
Austen Hufford, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
Intel Corp. on Monday said it struck a deal to buy Mobileye NV for about $15.3 billion, the latest investment by a technology company in the future of self-driving cars. […]
Mobileye makes chip-based camera systems that power semi-automated driving features that are already being used in cars, and is working to put that technology in the center of self-driving cars of the future.
Is there any major company in tech that is not investing heavily in self-driving cars?
MG Siegler:
Unlike most of the internet, I don’t tend to be one of those people who hates new features when they roll out simply because they’re different. There are exceptions, of course. But for the most part, I try to keep an open mind and often like many new features and fully recognize that even if I do not, any fervor over such changes is likely to subside quickly in the ever-shifting quicksands of internet time.
Which is to say, I gave “Messenger Day” a few days. I still absolutely hate it.
Facebook seems bizarrely obsessed with Snapchat.
Read between the lines on this one and it looks like Uber is in some real trouble. They got caught red handed.
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Great piece by David Pogue:
A few years ago, backstage at a conference, I spotted a blind woman using her phone. The phone was speaking everything her finger touched on the screen, allowing her to tear through her apps. My jaw hit the floor. After years of practice, she had cranked the voice’s speed so high, I couldn’t understand a word it was saying.
And here’s the kicker: She could do all of this with the screen turned off. Her phone’s battery lasted forever.
Ever since that day, I’ve been like a kid at a magic show. I’ve wanted to know how it’s done. I’ve wanted an inside look at how the blind could navigate a phone that’s basically a slab of featureless glass.
Ray Holley:
One day next week, if all goes according to plan, Tom Negrino will swallow a dose of anti-nausea drugs. Shortly afterward, he will raise a glass filled with four ounces of liquid and drink. Ninety capsules of a barbiturate will be dissolved in that glass. Negrino will follow it up with a glass of good wine, say goodbye to his wife and fall asleep. Within an hour, he will be dead.
According to his wife, Dori Smith, Negrino has fought his body and his health for all his 60 years. He was born with spina bifida, a defect in the backbone and membranes that surround the spinal cord. “When he was born, in the 1950s, only one out of 10 people born with spina bifida lived and of those, only one out of 10 ever walked,” Smith said. “Tom was in the 1 percent who lived and walked.”
Indeed, Negrino walked with a bit of a sway, but he went everywhere vigorously and purposefully. He was the author of 48 books, focusing on Macintosh computers and software. He wrote on his website, “I’ve been writing about Macs, other computers and software since dinosaurs ruled the earth. OK, it’s actually been since 1987.”
Heartbreaking, yet inspiring. Tom and Dori are good people. My best thoughts and wishes are with them.
David Kris, former assistant attorney general of the United States, writing for The Washington Post:
Third, Trump is spending at a terrific rate the accumulated credibility capital of the office he occupies. There may come a day when he needs to speak seriously, and to be taken seriously, at home or abroad. On his present course and speed, that will be a hard day. If this were “House of Cards,” it would all be very entertaining. As it is, existing institutions, both domestic and international, are going to have to adapt to this new feature of our world.
“The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf” is a simple parable for children. If you keep spouting bullshit, eventually there will come a point when people will not believe you when you’re telling an urgent truth.
Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, reporting for The New York Times on the fallout from Donald Trump’s completely unsubstantiated claim that Barack Obama had Trump’s “wires tapped” during the election:
So for Mr. Trump’s allies inside the West Wing and beyond, the tweetstorm spawned the mother of all messaging migraines. Over the past few days, they have executed what amounts to a strategic political retreat — trying to publicly validate Mr. Trump’s suspicions without overtly endorsing a claim some of them believe might have been generated by Breitbart News and other far-right outlets.
“No, that’s above my pay grade,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary and a feisty Trump loyalist, when asked on Tuesday at an on-camera briefing if he had seen any evidence to back up Mr. Trump’s accusation. The reporters kept at him, but Mr. Spicer pointedly and repeatedly refused to offer personal assurances that the president’s statements were true.
“No comment,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said earlier in the day. Last week, Mr. Sessions recused himself from any investigations involving the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.
“I don’t know anything about it,” John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, said on CNN on Monday. Mr. Kelly shrugged and added that “if the president of the United States said that, he’s got his reasons to say it.”
How’s this for a reason: Donald Trump is not mentally fit. He is unhinged from reality. Many of us have said this ever since the election began, and were dismissed as being blinded by partisanship. Now that he’s in office, Trump is proving it by his own words and deeds.
Mr. Trump, advisers said, was in high spirits after he fired off the posts. But by midafternoon, after returning from golf, he appeared to realize he had gone too far, although he still believed Mr. Obama had wiretapped him, according to two people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.
He sounded defiant in conversations at Mar-a-Lago with his friend Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, Mr. Ruddy said. In other conversations that afternoon, the president sounded uncertain of the procedure for obtaining a warrant for secret wiretaps on an American citizen.
Mr. Trump also canvassed some aides and associates about whether an investigator, even one outside the government, could substantiate his charge.
The president of the United States doesn’t know how warrants for wiretaps work, and considered hiring a private investigator to “prove” a fever dream charge against his predecessor. This man is unfit for the job, and not mentally well. Those surrounding him who refuse to acknowledge this and remove him from office are doing a grave disservice to the nation and the world, simply for the sake of protecting their own power.
Robert Graham, Errata Security:
I thought I’d write up some notes about the Wikileaks CIA “#vault7” leak. This post will be updated frequently over the next 24 hours.
The CIA didn’t remotely hack a TV. The docs are clear that they can update the software running on the TV using a USB drive. There’s no evidence of them doing so remotely over the Internet. If you aren’t afraid of the CIA breaking in an installing a listening device, then you should’t be afraid of the CIA installing listening software.
The CIA didn’t defeat Signal/WhatsApp encryption. The CIA has some exploits for Android/iPhone. If they can get on your phone, then of course they can record audio and screenshots. Technically, this bypasses/defeats encryption — but such phrases used by Wikileaks are highly misleading, since nothing related to Signal/WhatsApp is happening. What’s happening is the CIA is bypassing/defeating the phone. Sometimes. If they’ve got an exploit for it, or can trick you into installing their software.
I don’t trust WikiLeaks at all. They’re effectively an arm of Russian intelligence as far as I’m concerned. WikiLeaks’s own announcement of this dump made it sound — to laypeople — that the CIA had the ability to intercept encrypted Signal and WhatsApp messages. They don’t. If you have a secure device, WhatsApp and Signal are secure. If your device has been compromised, no messaging service can be secure — everything on a compromised device is compromised.
Danny Sullivan:
Obama’s planning a coup? Women are evil? Several presidents were in the KKK? Republicans are Nazis? Google can go spectacularly wrong with some of its direct answers.
Here we are again. Google’s in hot water because of what I call its “One True Answer” feature, where it especially highlights one search listing over all others as if that’s the very best answer. It’s a problem because sometimes these answers are terribly wrong.
This feature is just nowhere near ready for actual use.
Jacob Hall, writing for Slashfilm:
According to an official statement on the Walt Disney Company’s website, the untitled fifth Indiana Jones movie will arrive on July 19, 2019 and the whole gang is getting back together. Harrison Ford will return as Indy, Steven Spielberg will step behind the camera once more, and Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall will produce.
“The whole gang”, you say? I could have sworn there was someone else. Can’t quite put my finger on the name.
Tom Scocca:
Not only does Google, the world’s preeminent index of information, tell its users that caramelizing onions takes “about 5 minutes” — it pulls that information from an article whose entire point was to tell people exactly the opposite. A block of text from the Times that I had published as a quote, to illustrate how it was a lie, had been extracted by the algorithm as the authoritative truth on the subject.
Just me, or is Google search starting to slip? They’ve got the right destination — the URL they’re pointing to is arguably the definitive article on how long it takes to caramelize onions, and at worst, it is indisputably a very good answer to the question. But by attempting to parse the article and provide the answer right there in an excerpt in the search results, Google’s algorithm chooses a passage that provides a completely wrong answer.
When Google search simply ranked articles, and happily sent you away to read them on their original website, they were nearly perfect. But the more they try to tell you the answer to your questions without leaving Google itself, the more they seem to providing embarrassingly bad answers.
Julia Carrie Wong, writing for The Guardian:
Now the fallout from Uber’s terrible month is having an impact on another group: the company’s own former and current employees.
“People are looking to get out because they’re just sick of working for that company,” said a former Uber employee, who asked not to be identified. “A lot of them have told me that they’re having a hard time finding something new.”
At job interviews, the employee said, recruiters seem wary of Uber’s “hustle-oriented” workplace. “They have to defend themselves and say: ‘Oh, I’m not an asshole.’”
The “asshole” reputation stems from Uber’s corporate values, former employees and others in the tech industry said. For many, company “values” are the kind of corporate speak that rarely interferes with one’s day-to-day work environment. But at Uber, the emphasis on hustling, toe-stepping and meritocracy took on a more sinister aspect in the workplace.
Anecdotal, but it makes sense. I’d be suspicious of a job applicant who thrived at Uber.
Jordan Kahn, writing for 9to5Mac on a new report from Jamf on Apple’s rising popularity in the enterprise:
For the increase in Mac and iOS adoption now at 91 and 99 percent, Jamf notes that 74% of organizations saw an increase in Mac adoption and 76% an increase in iPhone and iPad adoption in 2016 versus the year before. IBM has now almost reached its goal of deploying 100,000 Macs, the report confirms, making it the largest company Mac deployment. IBM, which uses Jamf software to manage its deployment, first announced the goal during the JAMF Nation User Conference (JNUC) last October. At the time, IBM said it was saving on average a minimum of $265 per Mac versus a comparable PC due the cost of device itself, OS, support, resale value and deployment.
So today in 2017, Apple is struggling in the education and creative pro markets, and thriving in the enterprise. Try telling that to a time-traveler from 20 years ago.
Interesting but unsurprising report by Natasha Singer for The New York Times:
Over the last three years, Apple’s iPads and Mac notebooks — which accounted for about half of the mobile devices shipped to schools in the United States in 2013 — have steadily lost ground to Chromebooks, inexpensive laptops that run on Google’s Chrome operating system and are produced by Samsung, Acer and other computer makers.
Mobile devices that run on Apple’s iOS and MacOS operating systems have now reached a new low, falling to third place behind both Google-powered laptops and Microsoft Windows devices, according to a report released on Thursday by Futuresource Consulting, a research company.
Of the 12.6 million mobile devices shipped to primary and secondary schools in the United States in 2016, Chromebooks accounted for 58 percent of the market, up from 50 percent in 2015, according to the report. School shipments of iPads and Mac laptops fell to 19 percent, from about 25 percent, over the same period. Microsoft Windows laptops and tablets remained relatively stable at about 22 percent, Futuresource said.
If you look at The Times’s chart, you can see that in gross numbers, Apple’s education sales are down from their peak in 2013, but not drastically. Windows machines are up from their nadir in 2013, but not drastically. What’s drastic is the sharp rise in the sale of Chromebooks. Schools haven’t switched so much as they’ve increased the number of machines they’re buying, and most of those new machines are Chromebooks.
The shift toward Google-powered devices is hurting Apple’s revenue. Of the $7.35 billion that schools, colleges and universities spent on mobile and desktop computers in 2016, sales of Apple devices fell to $2.8 billion in 2016, from about $3.2 billion in 2015, according to IDC, a market research firm. Windows devices generated $2.5 billion in 2016, up from $2.1 billion in 2015, while Chrome devices reached $1.9 billion, up from $1.4 billion.
Apple still leads in revenue, but that’s because iPads and MacBooks are more expensive — and part of the reason for Chromebooks’ success in education is that the machines are so much cheaper. And it helps that Chromebooks are fundamentally designed as dumb terminals — any kid can grab any Chromebook and just sign in. Apple does offer solutions for iPads and MacOS, but fundamentally, iPads and Macs are designed as personal devices.
Kickstarter campaign from The Iconfactory to fund a modernized version of Twitterrific for Mac. They are this close to hitting their funding goal — let’s put them over the top. (And they’ve got some excellent stretch goals, like Direct Messaging support, so don’t let the fact that they’ll likely hit their initial funding goal before you read this stop you from backing them.)
Heather Havrilesky, reviewing Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist:
One drawback to the deluge of unfettered praise that follows any unexpected celebrity death is that it can be difficult to separate our nostalgic fantasies from the human being onto whom we project them. After all, Princess Leia formed a whole generation’s notion of female power and sexuality. Adorable, Disney-worthy title aside, Leia was not just another cutie singing and flouncing around a space palace, nor was she your stereotypical, skin-deep “strong” female character, replete with smart-lady glasses and an AK-47. Rather, Fisher’s Leia served as a talisman of casual, post-patriarchal female arrogance. Even though her character was very young and mostly wore white, she wasn’t remotely virginal, her tone of voice was the auditory equivalent of an eye roll, and she never hesitated to inform Darth Vader that he was wretched and vile, and to tell his henchmen that they stank to high heaven.
David Marchese has a terrific interview with David Letterman for New York Magazine:
Was it hard to adjust to civilian life?
It’s still hard. I have trouble operating the phone. That’s the God’s truth. I needed a pair of shoelaces. And I thought, Hell, where do you get shoelaces? And my friend said, there’s a place over off I-84, it’s the Designer Shoe Warehouse. So I go over there, and it’s a building the size of the Pentagon. It’s enormous. If you took somebody from — I don’t know, pick a country where they don’t have Designer Shoe Warehouses — blindfolded them and turned them loose in this place, they would just think, You people are insane. Who needs this many shoes? It’s sinful. It’s one of these places where there’s no employees and every now and then there’s just a scrum of shoe boxes. I’m not finding the damn shoelaces, and finally I think, Maybe it’s one of those items they’ve got at the counter. I go up there and I’m nosing around the counter and, by God, there’s shoelaces. This is after about an hour. So now I’m waiting in line and the woman checking people out says in a big loud voice, “May I help our next shoe lover, please?” I just started to tremble. Nobody else seems to have a problem with going to a store! You don’t want to have painted yourself into some elite position where it’s “Bob, go out and get me some shoelaces.” It makes you feel stupid. Here’s where I’m comfortable: There’s a bait-and-tackle store near my house. They’ve got guys in there, and you can buy live bait, you can buy artificial bait, they’ll put new line on your reel. You can talk to them about rods. They’ll tell you where to go for a largemouth bass. That’s exactly where I want to be.
His bits on Trumpy are so good.
We need Dave to come back.
This video is simply revolting.
Amazon Alexa says she doesn’t understand the question. Siri directs me to this article from ABC News, headlined “No, Former President Obama Isn’t Planning a Coup Against President Trump”.
$5,050 for alligator skin, but a mere $1,180 for monogrammed canvas. For people who are probably going to get a new iPhone with a new shape in six months. Jiminy.
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Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt, reporting for The New York Times:
Without offering any evidence or providing the source of his information, Mr. Trump fired off a series of Twitter messages claiming that Mr. Obama “had my ‘wires tapped.’ ” He likened the supposed tapping to “Nixon/Watergate” and “McCarthyism.” […]
Read Trump’s tweets for yourself. They are not the words of a mentally well man.
Former officials pointed to longstanding laws and procedures intended to ensure that presidents cannot wiretap a rival for political purposes.
“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” said Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.”
But a senior White House official said that Donald F. McGahn II, the president’s chief counsel, was working on Saturday to secure access to what the official described as a document issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing surveillance of Mr. Trump and his associates. The official offered no evidence to support the notion that such a document exists; any such move by a White House counsel would be viewed at the Justice Department as a stunning case of interference.
The New York Times is reporting that a senior White House official told them that the president’s chief counsel spent today attempting to interfere with a Justice Department investigation of the president’s own campaign. This is not the action of an administration with nothing to hide.
Trump administration: No organization can keep up with the pace at which we’re committing scandals.
Uber: Hold my beer.
Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:
Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been outright banned.
The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities such as Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China, Italy and South Korea. […]
Greyball and the broader VTOS program were described to The New York Times by four current and former Uber employees, who also provided documents. The four spoke on the condition of anonymity because the tools and their use are confidential and because of fear of retaliation by the company.
It’s like a daily soap opera at this point.
The first problem is that the PricewaterhouseCoopers accountant in charge of the cards was distracted tweeting photos from backstage, and handed Warren Beatty the wrong card. But this piece by Benjamin Bannister is right — the design of the cards themselves made it hard to tell at a glance that it was the wrong card.
Update: I forgot to mention that the design of the envelopes was even worse than that of the cards — small gold type on a deep red background, very hard to read.
Polygon:
Compared to the Wii U on its merits, the Switch is a slam dunk. It takes the basic concept of the Wii U, of a tablet-based console, and fulfills the promise of it in a way Nintendo simply wasn’t capable of realizing in 2012. It’s launching with a piece of software that, more than anything in the Wii U’s first year, demonstrates its inherent capability of delivering what Nintendo says is one of the Switch’s primary missions: a big-budget, AAA game that exists across a handheld device and a television-connected portable. The hardware lives up to its name in how easily and smoothly it moves between those two worlds, in how dead simple it all is to make something pretty magical happen.
Amazon:
The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.
That’s one hell of a typo.
We are making several changes as a result of this operational event. While removal of capacity is a key operational practice, in this instance, the tool used allowed too much capacity to be removed too quickly. We have modified this tool to remove capacity more slowly and added safeguards to prevent capacity from being removed when it will take any subsystem below its minimum required capacity level. This will prevent an incorrect input from triggering a similar event in the future.
A lot of system administrator tools are written without the equivalent of guardrails. Think about how much collective damage has been done from mistakes using the rm command alone.
Choe Sang-hun, reporting for The New York Times:
The head of Samsung, one of the world’s largest conglomerates, was indicted on bribery and embezzlement charges on Tuesday, becoming one of the most prominent business tycoons ever to face trial in South Korea.
The indictment of Lee Jae-yong, the company’s de facto leader, came at the end of a special prosecutor’s 90-day investigation of a corruption scandal that has already led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. When huge crowds took to the streets in recent months to demand that she leave office, they also called for the toppling of Mr. Lee and other corporate titans.
Mr. Lee was arrested on Feb. 17, a dramatic development in South Korea’s struggle to end collusive ties between the government and the family-controlled conglomerates, or chaebol, that dominate the economy.
Napier Lopez, reporting for The Next Web:
In that vein, you’ll now have the option to filter out posts from accounts without a profile picture (the ones with the default “egg” photo), as well as unverified emails or phone numbers. It’s a feature that’s been requested for some time, as it’s previously been easy for trolls to leverage new or unused accounts to harass people.
I suggested just this back in December.
Rob Cox, writing for Reuters:
Investors have effectively just done what no self-respecting person ever should: wear sweatpants in public. With Snap’s $3.4 billion initial public offering they have simply given up giving a damn. They handed their money over to an immature company and in the process abrogated their rights to fair treatment, good governance and reasonable valuations. If the $24 billion self-styled “camera company” run by a 26-year-old fails to achieve its ambitions, shareholders have only their capitulated selves to blame.
Snap founder Evan Spiegel’s disappearing-message application has many things going for it. One of these attributes — its virtual inaccessibility by anyone over the age of 30 — may have helped its IPO. Few seasoned portfolio managers wagering on the maker of rainbow-vomit photo filters will have properly vetted the product, though they will have perhaps gauged its popularity by monitoring their children’s mobile-data usage.
Tell us what you really think.
Ming-Chi Kuo:
New 2H17 models may all support fast charging. We believe all three new iPhones launching in 2H17 will support fast charging by the adoption of Type-C Power Delivery technology (while still retaining the Lightning port). A key technical challenge lies with ensuring product safety and stable data transmission during a fast charge. In order to achieve that goal, we think Apple will adopt TI’s power management and Cypress’s Power Delivery chip solutions for the new iPhone models. We note the OLED version may have a faster charging speed thanks to a 2-cell L shaped battery pack design.
As noted by MacRumors, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro already offers USB 3.0 speed and fast charging via a USB-C-to-Lightning cable. It looks like The Wall Street Journal botched their story Tuesday.
Peter Kafka, reporting for Recode:
Like other new digital TV services, YouTube TV won’t offer every network that cable TV services provide; instead it will feature a “skinny bundle,” composed of the four broadcast networks — Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC — along with some of the cable channels related to the broadcasters. Which means you’ll also get networks like Fox News, ESPN and Bravo; YouTube execs says the base package will include about three dozen channels.
Sports are still a problem:
Also be aware that all of the digital TV services still have gaps in their coverage, usually around pro football: Deals — or lack of them — with local affiliates may affect your ability to watch your local NFL team play next fall. And none of the streaming TV services will let you watch football on your phone, because those rights, for now, are exclusive to Verizon.
YouTube TV’s pricing will make it hard/impossible for YouTube to turn a profit, given the carriage fees it has to shell out for the four big networks, but YouTube doesn’t seem concerned about that: Right now it wants to work on turning some of its billion-plus users into paying subscribers.
Seems crazy that Google, a company famous for providing its services free of charge, would have a paid bundle of video content before Apple does.
Susan Fowler:
Uber names/blames me for account deletes, and has a different law firm — not Holders — investigating me. I have hired bakerlp.com
Research for the smear campaign has begun. If you are contacted by anyone asking for personal and intimate info about me, please report asap.
I don’t know who is doing this or why. If someone contacts you, please send me their contact information immediately.
The message to other women at Uber is clear: stay silent or we will come after you. Uber claimed last week that it was “in no way involved” with these phone calls investigating Fowler Rigetti’s personal life.
Update: Uber has issued a statement:
“The law firm Perkins Coie is looking into the specific allegations raised by Susan,” Uber said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “They will report into Eric Holder, who is responsible for the overall investigation into Uber’s workplace practices. To be clear: they are investigating Susan’s claims, not Susan personally.”
Anthony Smith, reporting for Mic:
Snapchat told a gun safety charity it might run NRA ads on the charity’s anti-gun violence awareness campaign — which would have featured videos starring families who lost their loved ones to firearms — if the charity didn’t pay Snapchat for advertising, emails provided to Mic by a source close to the exchange show. […]
“I just learned our News Team is doing a Live Story on National Gun Violence Awareness Day,” Saliterman’s message began. “I would urgently like to speak with you about advertising opportunities within the story, as there will be three ad slots. We are also talking to the NRA about running ads within the story.”
In other words, if the nonprofit partnered with Snapchat’s editorial department instead of paying the six-figure fee to promote its event through Snapchat’s advertising department, it ran the risk of having its gun safety message countered by the NRA, which strongly opposes the reform Everytown promotes.
Creepy.
Frederic Lardinois, writing for TechCrunch:
When asked if Google had plans to produce any more Pixel laptops, Osterloh said that the company had “no plans to do one right now.” He added that the versions that are already out in the market have totally sold out and that there are no plans to make any more of those, either. Indeed, if you go to the Google Store today, you won’t find any Pixel laptops for sale, though there are plenty of third-party Chromebooks available there.
The company is not, of course, talking about Chrome OS. “Chrome OS is a huge initiative in the company,” Osterloh said. “Google hasn’t backed away from laptops. We have the number two market share in the U.S. and U.K. — but we have no plans for Google-branded laptops.”
ChromeOS is popular, but it’s popular on piece-of-junk hardware. The idea of a premium computer running ChromeOS was appealing to like a dozen people.
Takashi Mochizuki, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
People familiar with Apple’s plans said the iPhone releases this year would include two models with the traditional LCD and a third one with an OLED screen.
Exactly in line with Ming Chi Kuo’s report from a few weeks ago:
Two new models similar to the current iPhone 7 and 7 Plus (presumably the “7S” and “7S Plus”).
They said Apple would introduce other updates including a USB-C port for the power cord and other peripheral devices, instead of the company’s original Lightning connector. The models would also do away with a physical home button, they said. Those updates would give the iPhone features already available on other smartphones.
This is a terribly-written paragraph. The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus already have no physical home button. Is he saying the Touch ID sensor is going away? Which new iPhones is Mochizuki claiming will have USB-C ports instead of Lightning? Only the high-end OLED model with the edge-to-edge display, or all three? It doesn’t make much sense to me that Apple would switch any iPhone to USB-C, but if they’re going to switch one, they should switch all of them.
If Apple had any plans to switch from Lightning to USB-C, why wouldn’t they have switched last year with the iPhone 7, when they started making tens of millions of pairs of Lightning ear buds? Why did they put a Lightning port on the AirPods case? My expectation has been that iPhones will never switch to USB-C — that Apple would stick with Lightning until they can do away with external ports entirely.
I have no inside dope on this, but it rings false to my ears. If there’s any truth to it, I’d bet that this year’s iPhones will ship with USB-C chargers, that use a USB-C to Lightning cable to connect to the phones. That makes sense, given that Apple has dropped USB-A ports from the newest MacBook models.
Using OLED displays would allow Apple to introduce a phone with a new look to fuel sales. Apple’s last major design overhaul came with the iPhone 6, a slimmer phone with larger displays that helped reignite sales growth and propel the company to record profit. The iPhone 7, introduced in September 2016, came with a similar design to its predecessor, contributing to slower sales in China. Analysts say Chinese consumers feel more motivated to buy a new phone when it has a different look that gives it appeal as a status symbol.
I get it. All things considered, a new iPhone that looks new is going to be more exciting than one that re-uses an existing design. I also get that, for cultural reasons, this is particularly true in China. (Ben Thompson has been emphasizing this for years.)
But this idea that anything short of a radically new design is bad for Apple just isn’t true. Based on the above passage, a reader would logically conclude that iPhones sales are down because the industrial design is too similar to its predecessor. But Apple just reported the highest iPhone sales in a quarter ever. Again, if they can meet demand, an exciting new hardware design should drive sales even higher — but it’s completely wrong to suggest that the similar-to-the-6/6S design of the iPhone 7 has led to a slump. ★
Speaking of martinis, out of curiosity I tried asking my Amazon Echo “How do you make a martini?” The answer was appalling:
“The martini is a cocktail made with 1 part gin and 6 parts vermouth.”
Those of you who enjoy a martini know that that recipe is backwards, and would make for a truly wretched drink — the International Bartenders Association standard recipe for a dry martini calls for 6 parts gin to 1 part vermouth. If anything, many martini aficionados prefer less vermouth than the IBA recipe.
Given the same query, Siri tells you (rather ungrammatically) “The main ingredient in martini (cocktail) is gin”, and points you to Wikipedia, which offers the IBA recipe. Google Assistant on a Pixel tells you “The Martini is a cocktail made with gin and vermouth, and garnished with an olive or a lemon twist.” You can then tap “Ingredients” to be shown a recipe with the IBA standard 6-to-1 gin-to-vermouth ratio.
Neither Siri nor Google Assistant are perfect here, but both put you one tap away from getting an acceptable recipe. Google gets points for doing it entirely within the Assistant interface (rather than punting you over to a web browser), but Siri gets points because Wikipedia’s page contains instructions on how to prepare the drink, not just what to put in it.
Alexa’s response is clearly the most ambitious, but it’s by far the worst because it’s so criminally wrong. “I don’t know, go check Wikipedia” is a much better response than a wrong answer.
Update: Two days after I tweeted about this, Alexa now correctly prescribes 6 parts of gin to 1 of vermouth. ★
Here’s an announcement from Apple that I wouldn’t have guessed in a hundred tries: they’re moving WWDC back to the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose.
The dates for WWDC 2017 are June 5–9. But the ticketing process isn’t until March 27. Like in previous years, it’ll be a lottery-type application system.
I had the chance to speak with Phil Schiller about this yesterday. The call was scheduled a few days in advance, but as usual with Apple, I didn’t know the topic. I spent the intervening days trying to guess. Moving WWDC back to San Jose truly didn’t even enter my mind. But now that I’ve had a day to think about it, I can see the logic.
First, announcing early really helps people who have to travel long distances to attend, particularly those from outside the U.S. In recent years, Apple has announced WWDC dates in April — as early as April 3 in 2014, and as late as April 28. Announcing the dates now, in mid-February, should help people save on airfare. It’s another sign that Apple is slowly getting more open. (Let’s see if they announce the dates this early next year too. It’s possible they only announced this early this year to brace people for the venue change.)
For people who will travel only if they get a conference pass, the timing doesn’t change as much. But even a few extra weeks is an improvement. And in recent years — particularly since the demise of Macworld Expo — WWDC is more than just the developer conference. It’s become the communal heart of the Apple world’s calendar. I know more people who come to WWDC without passes for the conference than who attend.
The San Jose Convention Center is the original home of WWDC — that’s where it was held from 1988 through 2002. (WWDC 2002 was the year Steve Jobs held a funeral for Mac OS 9 during the keynote.) San Jose is way closer to Apple headquarters. San Francisco is about an hour drive from 1 Infinite Loop. The San Jose Convention Center is only minutes away from Apple’s new San Jose campus, and is much closer to their Cupertino headquarters than San Francisco. Schiller emphasized to me that this is a big deal: more Apple employees from more teams will be present, simply because they won’t have to devote an entire day to being there. (This could be a particular boon to WWDC’s developer labs, where attendees can get precious face time with Apple’s engineers.)
I asked whether the move to San Jose changed the number of people who’d be able to attend. Schiller said it did not — attendance will be about the same. (To my knowledge, Apple has never revealed exact attendance figures, and Schiller didn’t offer an exact number, but it’s somewhere around 5,000.)
My first WWDC was 2006, a few years after the move to San Francisco, so I’ve never been to one in San Jose. The rap from my friends who did attend WWDC back when it was in San Jose is that San Jose was a bit of a sleepy town. It’s a work-oriented city, where it gets quiet after 5 pm. But WWDC was, compared to now, sparsely attended back then. WWDC didn’t sell out until 2008 (the first year of the iPhone App Store).
Schiller seems confident that there’s going to be a lot going on outside the convention center. Apple is working with the city and San Jose mayor Sam Liccardo to stage events around the downtown area throughout the week.
WWDC is the biggest event of the year for the Apple world. But for the city of San Francisco, it’s just another conference at Moscone. In fact, by Moscone standards, WWDC is actually kind of small. Oracle’s OpenWorld conference has over 60,000 attendees — 12 times the size of WWDC. Update: Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference had 170,000 attendees last year.
WWDC will be the biggest thing going on in San Jose that week. I don’t have a feel for San Jose — the only time I’ve ever set foot there was for Apple’s 2012 October event. I could see it going one of two ways: either dreadfully dull, or, something akin to SXSW in Austin, where the conference and its attendees more or less take over the entire convention center area downtown. In San Francisco, WWDC attendees are a small school of like-minded fish in a big pond. In San Jose, they’ll own the pond. WWDC’s presence can expand outside the confines of McEnery in a way that it can’t expand outside Moscone.
One last factor, unstated by Apple, but very obvious to anyone who knows how to comparison shop for hotel rooms: downtown San Jose is way cheaper than downtown San Francisco, and the surrounding area has a ton of good hotel rooms at very affordable rates. In San Francisco nice hotels are very expensive, and the hotels that aren’t expensive are not nice. In recent years, a lot of people who come to WWDC have been booking hotels down closer to San Jose simply because they’re so much cheaper.
So here’s my take:
For Apple, this is a win. They’ll cumulatively spend thousands of fewer hours driving up and down Highway 280. They have the potential to involve their soon-to-open new campus in the event somehow. They have more influence and control over the area around the convention center, rather than just inside it.
For attendees, it’s hard to say. For those on a budget, it’s surely a win. San Jose is way more affordable than San Francisco. (But the hotels closest to the convention center in downtown San Jose are running around $350 a night — no savings at all compared to Moscone-area hotels in San Francisco.) For those more concerned with the social scene, it’s too early to judge. If it resembles the social scene from the previous era of San Jose WWDCs, it’ll be a bust. If you’d asked me in recent years whether it’s worth it to go to WWDC even if you’re not attending the conference proper, I’d have said yes without hesitation. I really don’t know if that’s going to be true now that it’s in San Jose.
The word that comes to mind is nostalgia. For most of the regular WWDC attendees in my circle, San Francisco and Moscone are all we know. There’s an established familiarity to the places (hotels, restaurants, bars) and the schedule. Even if WWDC works out great in San Jose, there is a lot that I will miss about WWDC’s years in San Francisco. But WWDC is only moving, not ending, so it’s a very different nostalgia than that for Macworld Expo.
WWDC in San Jose hearkens back to what was truly a different era for Apple. When the last WWDC was held in San Jose in 2002, the original iPod was only six months old, and I was three months away from starting Daring Fireball. An investment in Apple stock in 2002 would have increased around a hundredfold if held through today.
Apple doesn’t like to explain itself. I don’t know why Apple moved WWDC to San Francisco in 2003. But my guess is that they sought more media attention. Apple went to where the attention was. Today, the attention comes to Apple. They could hold WWDC in the middle of a desert and it would still sell out in an instant and there’d be the same convoy of media trucks outside the hall the morning of the keynote. If a large corporation can be described as a homebody, Apple is it. And San Francisco is not Apple’s home turf.
Schiller has been at Apple (and on stage at WWDC) throughout this entire run, and he seems ready to go back. “It feels like WWDC is going home,” he told me. ★
