This Is What Happens to Your Brain When You Get Kicked in the Head | Mother JonesWho else but very special guest John Moltz to ring in The Talk Show’s centurial episode. Topics include the new book Moltz co-wrote, ; writing tools, including word processors and M shopping for gaming PCs as a M Microsoft Office going free Twitter’s stilte President Obama’s statement on Net N and Tim Cook’s eloquent essay announcing that he’s gay.
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I really enjoy reviews like this one by David Ruddock at Android Police. It’s often very interesting to read something from the point of view of someone more deeply attuned to another platform. This, from the list of “cons” for the iPad, caught my eye:
Is an iPad, will result in some people thinking you’re an Apple
sycophant / the kind of person who lingers at coffee shops for 8
hours a day.
I often need reminding just how weird some people’s ideas are about Apple and Apple users.
Substantially, these few bits stood out to me. Battery life:
Standby life on the Nexus 9 isn’t fantastic, either - I’m getting
around 15% idle drain quite reliably every 24 hours, which is
absolutely at odds with Google’s 30-day standby estimate. Even if
you don’t agree with my assessment of the usage time life,
Android’s idle drain is still an absolute embarrassment. I could
let my first Air sit for a week untouched and the battery gauge
would barely budge - maybe a few percent. Android has never been
great about this, and it doesn’t seem to be getting much better.
Safari vs. Chrome:
You can throw benchmarks and timed tests at me until you’re blue
in the face - mobile Safari kicks Chrome’s ass every day of the
week. The smoothness alone is evidence to me that while Google may
care about a browser’s technical proficiency, Apple cares at least
as much about its usability and consistency, if not more.
Chrome for Android’s usability is a victim of Google’s
cross-platform utopian vision, and for now, it’s just not a
fantastic touch browser. Safari may not always be faster in every
benchmark or timed comparison, but it’s smoother in all the ways
that matter.
From a smoothness and stability standpoint, iOS 8 feels so much
more refined and predictable than Lollipop does on the Nexus 9.
Apple is known for obsessing over things like animation draw times
and smooth scrolling, trying to create an experience that never
feels jarring or rough around the edges. Apple seems to toil
indefatigably to ensure those home screen swipes and launch
animations are perfect every time. Moving to the more powerful A8X
chip with three cores now means that smoothness persists even
during app installs or other background operations, an area where
the first Air occasionally would have difficulty.
This is such a huge thing, for me, from a UX standpoint. Google
has tried to instill these values in Android with things like
Project Butter, but it’s never seemed to pan out exactly in the
way I think we all hoped would. The obsession with smoothness in
iOS is almost religious. In Android, it’s always seemed like an
attitude of “hey, if you can keep things at around 60FPS, that’d
be great or whatever.” I realize animations and such things are
far more aesthetic than functional, but they can have a huge
effect on how you perceive performance and feel about a device.
Using the iPad just feels nicer, I don’t find myself getting
annoyed by it nearly as often as the Nexus.
This ties into one of my recent themes here on DF, regarding Google’s own iOS apps, and the asymmetry of the Google/Apple Android/iOS rivalries. Ruddock is clearly an Android guy, but more so than that he’s a Google guy. He can use an iPad and still have a Gmail app, still have a Google Maps app, still use Google Docs, etc. Google’s wide support for iOS makes it a lot more likely that an all-in Google platform user might prefer an iPad to an Android tablet.
Take it with a grain of salt since the numbers don’t come from Apple, but interesting if true. 3-to-1 sounds about right to me. But there was an app analytics report a few weeks ago , and .
Update: TV Pro — a TV guide app in Germany — .
While Glass may find some specialized, even lucrative, uses in the
workplace, its prospects of becoming a consumer hit in the near
future are slim, many developers say.
Connie Loizos, reporting for Strictly VC:
Sources who spoke to StrictlyVC and asked to remain anonymous say
Fadell has fashioned a hierarchical structure reminiscent of TV’s
“Game of Thrones.”
According to one employee, “Almost every decision, no matter how
small,” goes through either Fadell or Matt Rogers, who cofounded
Nest with Fadell and was previously a senior manager at Apple.
(Through a spokesperson, Fadell and Rogers declined to answer
questions for this story.)
“It’s always, ‘Tony and Matt want us to do this. We have to hit
this deadline because Tony and Matt want us to.’ You definitely
see people taking the path of least resistance because they don’t
want to upset Tony.”
Another employee calls it a “huge meeting culture, to the point
where anyone at the director level or up spends their entire day
in meetings, many of them duplicative meetings about the same
subject, over and over to the point where a lot of people have
complained.”
Sounds like Nest’s acquisition of Dropcam isn’t going smoothly.
Alex Epstein makes the case that Apple’s claim that its “data centers are powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources, which result in zero greenhouse gas emissions” is fraudulent:
Imagine this scenario: Apple CEO Tim Cook wants to take an ocean
liner across the Atlantic. He has a problem. Ocean liners run on
oil but Cook wants to be “green.”
What can he do?
Well, he could try his luck with a sailboat. But the wind is
volatile and unreliable — not to mention that a wind-swept voyage
across the ocean would be dangerous.
But then, when all hope seems lost, Apple Board member Al Gore
offers an idea. Use an ocean liner, but install sails on top, so
that at least part of the time the boat is at least partially
powered by wind.
Epstein is the author of a new book titled , so he’s clearly coming at this from a certain perspective.
Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting
everyone to their world via our information sharing and
distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue
generating Internet companies in the world.
That’s 220 characters. If any company should be able to fit its strategy into a single tweet, it’s Twitter. So clunky. Worrisome that they can’t express themselves clearly.
I can just see the argument. “Let’s call them platforms.” “No, products.” “Platforms!” “Products!” “Wait, I’ve got it: platform products.”
I’m sure there’s an artful way to use “world” three times in the
same sentence, but that ain’t it.
Eli Hodapp, writing for Touch Arcade:
I don’t know how many of those angry single star iTunes reviewers
read TouchArcade… But, seriously guys? It seems like the hive
mind of the App Store is continually pushing developers in to this
unrealistic corner of demanding absolutely everything but not
being willing to pay anything. The fact of the matter is Monument
Valley is an amazing game, made by real artists, working in a real
studio, getting paid real salaries, with real families they go
home to and support. They’re selling their game for a total of six
bucks if you buy both the game itself and the expansion. I don’t
fully understand what happened to get us on this horrible Biff
with the almanac timeline of Earth where this kind of thing is
unacceptable to iOS gamers.
Two fucking dollars. I’m going to the App Store to leave a 5- such a , and the App Store rating is being trashed by cheapskate morons.
These photos from the Rosetta spacecraft and Philae lander are just hauntingly beautiful. Can’t stop looking at them.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Philae probe successfully landed
on the Comet 67P, a first in space exploration.
The Rosetta satellite and its probe payload arrived at the Comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Aug. 6 after 10 years, five months, and
four days in space. Rosetta traveled 6.4 billion kilometers (3.98
billion miles) on its journey and orbited the sun five times.
10-year mission. 4 billion miles. Landing on a comet traveling 40,000 miles per hour. Science.
Dan Provost, Studio Neat:
Tom and I have been reading and thinking about these things for a
while, and a few months ago we had a realization. Studio Neat is
in a unique position. We are not just app developers, we also sell
physical products. Products that are meant to work with the apps
in a way that enhances both, as is the case with the Glif and Slow
Fast Slow or Frameographer. What if we make apps that are free
with “ads”, but the ad is simply for our other products? You know,
the products that actually make money?
It was an intriguing enough idea that we decided to try it, first
with Slow Fast Slow. As of today, you can
Slow Fast Slow
for free. If you are unaware, Slow Fast Slow is our app for
manipulating the speed of videos with our interactive timeline. It
works amazingly well with the new 240 fps videos on the iPhones 6.
Clever idea from John August: a deck of cards with advice, ideas, and tricks for helping writers get unstuck. Nicely illustrated and designed (including excellent use of Univers). It’s a Kickstarter campaign that aimed small and has exploded way past their original goal. But the coolest thing is they’re donating packs of the cards to youth writing programs, and the more decks they sell, the cheaper each deck becomes to produce, and the more they’ll have to donate.
The project is already funded nine times over, but if they can get a few more thousand backers
(by backers, not dollars) ever. And you can get in for just $15 — or, just $12 if you want to donate two packs to the youths.
Fred Wilson on Net Neutrality:
This is about something more simple and more important. It is
about making sure that the Internet remains open and free for
innovation. It is about recognizing that the last mile of the
wired and wireless internet is a natural monopoly/duopoly where
scale creates massive advantages, just like the electrical grid
and the water system. It is about making sure that the massive
companies that operate these last mile monopolies don’t use their
market power to extract rents from the entrepreneurs, developers,
and companies that must go through those networks to reach their
customers.
This is about keeping the Internet the way it has been operating
for the past twenty years. This is a conservative idea. Don’t
change something that has worked so well for so long. Don’t allow
the telcos to start inspecting each packet and prioritizing some
over others.
Solves the problem where people who switched from iPhone to another platform were unable to receive SMS messages from iPhone users, because iMessage still considered their phone number tied to their iMessage account. The trick was always to disable iMessage on your iPhone before switching your SIM card, but no one ever thought to do that.
When they were designing the “use iMessage instead of SMS when texting from one iPhone to another” feature, I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone at Apple that someone might eventually want to switch from iPhone to another phone.
Stu Maschwitz:
We’re back to the trailer embedded at the top of this post. Maybe
you think it’s funny, maybe you don’t. But what I love about it is
that someone finally realized that this kind of movie would be not
one tenth of a percent better with animated cat mouths.
Dr. Drang, back in March 2013:
If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in
the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle
of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for
civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without
artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour
This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. Good for a nation
of farmers, I suppose, but of no value to anyone in our current
urban/suburban society except those people who get up and go
running before work. And I see no reason to encourage them.
Good bit of follow-up to the DST discussion on .
Marco Arment:
after years of Kindles being
into flimsier, lower-end devices, but I think it’s
clear that Amazon just isn’t willing or able to make a premium,
high-quality e-reader.
Amazon first made the Kindle in 2007 — it’s not like they’re new at this. The obvious answer is that they just don’t give a shit about making a truly high-quality product.
Jason Snell:
Amazon’s been headed in this direction for a while now. The
original Kindle screen was 167 the Paperwhite upped that all
the way to 212 ppi. The Paperwhite’s screen is actually quite
good, but the Voyage’s is still noticeably better. To put it in
Apple terms, this is really the first Kindle with a Retina
Unfortunately, Amazon has invested all of this effort in improved
reading technology only to find itself completely at sea when it
comes to typography. The Voyage still only offers six typefaces —
many of them
— and still
force-justifies every line (with no hyphenation!), creating
variable-length gaps between words just so the right margin is
straight rather than ragged. A device that’s dedicated to words on
a page, one with a screen this beautiful, deserves better type
It’s depressing that all my typographic complaints from two years ago still stand. Amazon hasn’t improved the typography of Kindles in any way since then, other than by increasing the resolution of the display. I’ll repeat now what I wrote then:
Amazon’s goal should be for Kindle typography to equal print
typography. They’re not even close. They get a pass on this only
because all their competitors are just as bad or worse. Amazon
should hire a world-class book designer to serve as product
manager for the Kindle.
They should either devise or license (from Adobe?) a world-class hyphenation-justification algorithm while they’re at it. I’ll never buy another Kindle device until they fix this.
Update: Numerous readers have pointed out that they could just use the excellent .
President Obama:
I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net
neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the
phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting
what you can do or see online. The rules I am asking for are
simple, common-sense steps that reflect the Internet you and I use
every day, and that some ISPs already observe. These bright-line
rules include:
No blocking. If a consumer requests access to a website or
service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be
permitted to block it. That way, every player — not just those
commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your
No throttling. Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow
down some content or speed up others — through a process often
called “throttling” — based on the type of service or your
ISP’s preferences.
Increased transparency. The connection between consumers and
ISPs — the so-called “last mile” — is not the only place some
sites might get special treatment. So, I am also asking the FCC
to make full use of the transparency authorities the court
recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules
to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the
No paid prioritization. Simply put: No service should be stuck
in a “slow lane” because it does not pay a fee. That kind of
gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to
the Internet’s growth. So, as I have before, I am asking for an
explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction
that has a similar effect.
It saddens me, and almost surprises me, that this issue has become .
“Net Neutrality” is Obamacare for the I the Internet
should not operate at the speed of government.
That’s just word soup. The only similarity to the Affordable Care Act is that Obama supports it. There may well be a rational, reasoned argument against Net Neutrality, but Republicans aren’t making it, and neither are the cable companies or cellular providers. Be wary of the side that can’t express their argument in clear, plain, unambiguous language.
Very special guest Merlin Mann returns to the show to talk about Comcast customer service, cable-cutting, Marlins Man (no relation) and his showboating-spectator predecessors, and the state of podcasting today. Also: daylight savings time and Roman numerals. You know, the usual stuff.
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Matt Miller ran for Congress in west L.A. this year, and wrote about the experience for Politico Magazine. Fascinating, if depressing, “this is what it’s like” perspective:
Campaign fundraising is a bizarre, soul-warping endeavor. You spend your time endlessly adding to lists of people who might be in a position to help. You enter them on a spreadsheet (dubbed “The Tracker”) and sort the names from high to low in terms of their giving potential. You start to think of every human being in your orbit as having a number attached to them. You book breakfasts, lunches, coffees and drinks at which you make the case for your candidacy … and ask for money. Always money. You call dozens of people a day … and ask for money. When people ask how they can help, you mostly ask them for the names of folks you can … ask for money.
I’ve been selling weekly DF RSS feed sponsorships since 2007 — just a hair under 400 consecutive weeks. I’ve never had one quite like this week’s. The sponsor is Meh, a new daily deal site from the founders of Woot. Here’s the sponsored RSS entry they wrote, in its entirety:
Fucking Amazon
I sold Woot to Amazon and they made it shitty. So I quit. Then I
got bored.
with a few others from Woot. We just launched a classic daily deal
site — only one thing for sale each day.
Oh, and since you seem to be into RSS, we put one together just
for you, at . Of
course you can also just go to
The headline — “Fucking Amazon” was so bizarre that when it hit the @daringfireball Twitter account, I got about a dozen replies asking if the account had been hacked.
These guys don’t do marketing like other people do marketing. They really do have amazing prices on the products they sell, but the heart of Meh is what made Woot interesting back in the day: the writing. Click through and see for yourself. My thanks to them for sponsoring DF this week. Also:
in D Magazine from earlier this year.
Kif Leswing, reporting for GigaOm:
Even if you’re uninterested in GT Advanced Technologies, there are
a number of details about how much power Apple exercises over its
suppliers.
Squiller says that Apple did not ever really enter into
negotiations, warning that GTAT’s managers should “not waste their
time” negotiating because Apple does not negotiate with its
suppliers. According to GTAT, after the company balked, Apple told
GTAT that its terms are standard for other Apple suppliers and
that GTAT should “put on your big boy pants and accept the
agreement.”
GTAT’s take seems to be:
Apple doesn’t negotiate terms.
Apple’s terms were onerous.
We accepted Apple’s terms.
One of the best sites on the web just got better.
Dustin Curtis on Amazon’s hardware aspirations:
It’s an echo chamber. They make a product, they market the product
, they sell the product
customers, they
get a false sense of success, the customer puts the product in a
drawer and never uses it, and then Amazon moves on to the next
product. Finally, with the Fire Phone, customers have been pushing
back. You can’t buy a phone and put it in a lonely drawer, never
to use it again, like you would with a Fire Tablet. You can’t dupe
your customers by selling them a shitty phone, because a phone
becomes a part of its user’s identity.
He’s spot-on about whether there’s actually any evidence of more developers going Android-first (spoiler: no), but the real gem in this piece is his dispassionate delineation of Business Insider’s web page design cruft in footnote 1.
David Smith on the imminent release of the first WatchKit SDK:
So to start with we will be given the ability to implement
actionable notifications and Glances. This is what I believe
we are getting with the SDK release this month.
It will only be later next year that full apps will be possible.
It is not a stretch to think that later next year is code for
WWDC next June. Likely along with WatchOS (or whatever they call
it) version 2.0. There is a delightful symmetry with the history
of iPhone OS, where we didn’t get a full SDK until 2.0 (though I’m
sure people will similarly jailbreak to get a head-start).
The lead from James Trew’s Engadget review of the new LG G Watch R:
I think it’s fair to say by now that smartwatches are no longer
the “hot new thing.” It’s an established product category. The
paint might still be a little wet on the whole idea, and some
might argue there are areas that still need improving, but these
clever timepieces are officially here to stay.
I find this perspective to be staggeringly shallow, but it’s an accurate reflection of what I find so inane about mainstream tech journalism. To say that smartwatches are “no longer the ‘hot new thing’” boggles the mind. They’ve never been the hot new thing. It remains to be seen if they ever will be. “Some might argue there are areas that still need improving”? You don’t say. This is as silly a thing to say in 2014 about watches as the same paragraph would have been about phones in 2004, or PCs in 1984.
Put aside some time to truly savor this piece. So good, in so many ways.
Nick Wingfield, writing for the NYT:
But in a sign of the seismic changes underway in the tech
industry, Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, said on
Thursday that it would give away a comprehensive mobile edition of
Office. The free software for iPads, iPhones and Android tablets
will do most of the most essential things people normally do with
the computer versions of the product.
Just a few years ago, giving away a full free version of Office
would have earned a Microsoft chief executive a visit from a witch
doctor. Now, the move is following through on the rallying cry
coming from Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s new chief executive, who
has pushed cloud and mobile computing as lodestars for the
company’s future.
It seems that Microsoft is finally accepting the reality of
Office’s market position on smartphones and tablets. To some
degree, Office needs to compete with the free Google Docs and
iWork, but for many customers, it’s also competing with the idea
of simply not using office apps (or using them far less often).
The scorecard includes more than three dozen tools, including chat
clients, text messaging apps, email applications, and technologies
for voice and video calls. EFF examined them on seven factors,
like whether the message is encrypted both in-transit and at the
provider level, and if the code is audited and open to independent
review. Six of these tools scored all seven stars, including
ChatSecure, CryptoCat, Signal/Redphone, Silent Phone, Silent Text,
and TextSecure. Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime products stood out
as the best of the mass-market options, although neither currently
provides complete protection against sophisticated, targeted forms
of surveillance. Many options — including Google, Facebook, and
Apple’s email products, Yahoo’s web and mobile chat, Secret, and
WhatsApp — lack the end-to-end encryption that is necessary to
protect against disclosure by the service provider. Several major
messaging platforms, like QQ, Mxit, and the desktop version of
Yahoo Messenger, have no encryption at all.
I’ve never heard of any of the six apps to which they awarded all seven stars.
My pal Anil Dash served up a dose of his own two-year-old claim chowder.
A wireless speaker with an always-listening Siri/Google Now-style voice-driven AI agent named Alexa. $199, or $99 for Prime members.
Update: It took me a few hours to collect my thoughts on this. First, I think it’s problematic that Echo is anchored in a room. How will anyone get in the habit of using this instead of Siri or Google Now when they can only use it in one room? In their demo video, the family seemingly bought three or four of these things, because they have one in their living room, kitchen, and bedroom. Your phone is in your pocket all the time. And if it is anchored in a room, why not combine it with the Fire TV? I want fewer gadgets in my living room, not more. If Apple did this it’d be a feature of Apple TV, not yet another standalone gadget. (And I think it’d be a great idea for Apple to add “Hey Siri” listening to Apple TV.)
Kyle VanHemert, writing for Wired:
There’s also the risk that material design’s stringent rules could
make for an unrelentingly homogenous ecosystem. Nicholas Jitkoff,
one of the project’s lead designers, says Google is cognizant that
it needs to leave room for third parties to express their own
personalities. At one point in the development of material design,
Google designers even made mock-ups of third-party apps themselves
to see if they felt sufficiently unique.
In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, Jitkoff is the genius
back in the day.
This is kind of amazing — it’s the full Uber app running as a web app. Really well done. I
he’s under the impression that this is what the Uber mobile app is using behind the scenes, that the mobile app is just a thin webview wrapper around this mobile web app. It might be for some platforms, but I don’t think that’s true for iOS — there are a lot of little things that are subtly different between the iPhone app and this website, even when running on an iPhone.
You expect things like this from Samsung and Xiaomi, but not from Lenovo. Just shameless. (The comment thread on this one is worth a skim too, but don’t start reading them with a beverage in your mouth.)
You can’t just expect people to switch to an altogether unfamiliar device because of a corporate sponsorship. iPads are essential tools for many people. Familiarity matters. Microsoft needs to focus on getting people to want to use Surface tablets, not use them because of a corporate sponsorship. This is just embarrassing.
I knew this, but at some point forgot — that sideways-V-with-three-nodes share icon was created by my friend Alex King back in 2007, released under four different open source licenses.
Other than the status bar differences, it pretty much looks exactly the same on iOS and Android. Same colors, same fonts, same icons. New features include OpenTable and Uber integration.
New today: updated Android apps
and . Both look interesting — , “Google is reworking Mail and Calendar from database displays to task-led interfaces. I wonder how far they’ll take that.”
And intriguingly, as Google’s new “ language evolves, it’s very clearly heading in a different direction than iOS. Talking about flatness is simply too superficial to be a useful discussion. Superficially, iOS and Android seemingly converged toward flatness (and Windows Phone, of course, was there already), but once you get past those surface similarities, all three mobile platforms are evolving in noticeably different ways.
But Google’s “Material Design” isn’t merely the design language for Android, it’s the design language for all the company’s software. One result of this is that Google’s iOS apps feel less and less like iOS apps with each major release. To me, they look and feel like Android apps running on iOS. Android users might disagree with that assessment, as much of what makes a good Android app Android-y is not how the software looks but the way it interacts with the system. But these Google apps certainly don’t look or feel quite like iOS apps. Their brand-new you-need-a-beta-invitation
is also interesting (I got an invitation last week), but even though it’s a brand-new app, if anything, it feels less like an iOS app than Google’s other iOS apps. For one thing, Inbox uses a blue background for the status bar, which is the system-standard cue to indicate that cellular tethering is engaged. Another example: None of the Google iOS apps I have on my iPhone (Maps, Gmail, Inbox) support the iOS standard swipe-from-left-edge shortcut to go back in the view hierarchy. That’s a two-year-old standard design pattern for iOS, and I find it downright essential with the bigger displays on the new iPhones. (In hindsight, it seems fairly obvious that Apple added this gesture in iOS 7 because they knew then that bigger-screen iPhones were in the pipeline.)
One last thought. Lost in the competition between platforms (iOS vs. Android) is the more philosophical competition between native and in-browser web apps. In the early days of iOS, say,
, it was easy to conflate these two battles in public debate, because Apple was seen as the primary proponent of native app development, and Google was seen as a proponent of cross-platform web apps. No more. Google today (like Facebook) seems all-in on native apps, at least (again, like Facebook) for post-PC devices. Just a few years ago, I used to see a lot more arguments from web-app proponents that native apps’ dominance on mobile devices would be short-lived. I don’t see so much of that any more.
One reason some people argue in favor of in-browser HTML/CSS/JavaScript web apps is that it’s the last bastion for . The lament I hear most frequently about mobile development is that if you want to reach the widest possible audience, you have to write at least two apps, iOS and Android. If you include Windows Phone, now you’re up to three. My take has always been: Tough luck. The point of making apps shouldn’t be about making life easier for developers, it’s about making the best possible apps for users. If you value user experience above developer convenience, it’s easy to see why native apps are winning the war. But even on the desktop, with PC browsers, write-once-run-everywhere is often just a pipe dream.
when I try to log into the desktop web app version of Google Inbox using Safari on OS X Yosemite.
I don’t think the web version of Inbox is Chrome-only because Google wants to lock people into Chrome. I don’t think it’s about spite. I think it was just a practical decision that fell out of a desire to push the limits of the in-browser web app experience, rather than limit themselves to a common baseline of functionality available across the X top browsers. Cynics surely look at this as the second coming of Microsoft’s IE-only web technologies from the late ’90s, but my guess is that support for additional browsers is coming, that Safari is probably high on that list, and they shipped Chrome-first only because it was the fastest way they could ship. One reason Google created Chrome in the first place was to have a browser they controlled to better enable the sort of web apps they wanted to build.
In short, though, a Chrome-only app from Google — even if only temporary — is not how the world of standards-supporting web apps was supposed to work, in the aftermath of the breakup of Microsoft’s IE hegemony. But I’m not surprised. Practicality trumps idealism in the long-run, and the idea that the post-IE world of web browsers would lead to a world of universal cross-platform software is pretty much the definition of an idealistic crusade.
I see a certain irony in all this. Google is cultivating a single look-and-feel for their apps. But for mobile they’re creating them as separate native Android and iOS apps. But their latest web app for desktop PCs, Inbox, only runs in one browser, Chrome.&
Earlier this week, pharmacy chain Rite Aid shut down unofficial
support for the Apple Pay and Google Wallet mobile payments
systems, resulting in an outcry from users who have been testing
out Apple’s new system since its launch on Monday. Rite Aid was
not an official Apple Pay partner, but the payments system
generally works with existing near field communications (NFC)
payment terminals anyway, and many users had had success using
Apple Pay at Rite Aid stores early in the week.
It now appears that fellow major pharmacy chain CVS is following
suit and as of today is shutting down the NFC functionality of its
payment terminals entirely, a move presumably intended to thwart
Apple Pay. Google Wallet services are obviously also being
affected by the move.
These retailers are part of a group (Merchant Customer Exchange, “MCX”) working on an upcoming mobile payment system called CurrentC. , writing for Mainstreet Inc., a point-of-sale provider:
CurrentC mobile payments platform by Merchant Customer Exchange
(MCX) is a mobile wallet being developed by a group of major
retailers who want greater control of payments, their mobile brand
and mobile customer experience. They want to keep more of their
customer data, rather than ceding to technology companies. MCX was
established in 2012 and currently consists of 59 participating
retailers, many large Tier 1 merchants, across all segments. […]
[Update: Not sure why, but Mainstreet Inc. took down the original article. I’m now linking to Google’s cached version of it.]
Here’s how it’s supposed to work:
The application can be downloaded for free from the App Store and
Google Play Store. Available for both iOS and Android devices, it
is designed to ‘simplify and expedite the customer checkout
process by applying qualifying offers and coupons, participating
merchant rewards, loyalty programs and membership accounts, and
offering payment options through the consumer’s selected financial
account, all with a single scan.”
Using CurrentC mobile payments the point-of-sale displays a QR
code for the customer to read with their phone.
The QR code generates the payment token on the smartphone which
verifies the shopper’s presence, identity and initiates the
transaction between the merchant and the bank.
The phone connects with the cloud for authorization and sends
the approval to the merchant.
CurrentC doesn’t support the contactless Near Field Communications
(NFC) used by Apple Pay.
QR codes. Good luck with that. Plus, CurrentC doesn’t even work with credit cards — it only works with prepaid store cards and debit cards tied directly to your bank account. Apple Pay is built atop th CurrentC is a (futile, I say) attempt to eliminate credit card.
What Apple gets and what no one else in the industry does is that using your mobile device for payments will only work if it’s far easier and better than using a credit card. With CurrentC, you’ll have to unlock your phone, launch their app, point your camera at a QR code, and wait. With Apple Pay, you just take out your phone and put your thumb on the Touch ID sensor.
Tim Cook was exactly right on stage last month when he introduced Apple Pay: it’s the only mobile payment solution designed around improving the customer experience. CurrentC is designed around the collection of customer data and the ability to offer coupons and other junk. . It looks like a joke, but that’s for real. And that’s the sort of experience they want to bring to mobile payments.
If I’m reading this right, and I think I am, these retailers who are shutting down their NFC payment systems are validating that Apple Pay is actually working, that people are actually using it. And remember, it only works with the month-old iPhones 6. Think about what happens a year or two from now when a majority of iPhones in use are Apple Pay enabled.
Think about what they’re doing. They’re turning off NFC payment systems —
— only because people were actually using them with Apple Pay. Apple Pay works so well that it even works with non-partner systems. These things have been installed for years and so few people used them, apparently, that these retailers would rather block everyone than allow Apple Pay to continue working. I can’t imagine a better validation of Apple Pay’s appeal.
And the reason they don’t want to allow Apple Pay is because Apple Pay doesn’t give them any personal information about the customer. It’s not about security — Apple Pay is far more secure than any credit/debit card system in the U.S. It’s not about money — Apple’s tiny slice of the transaction comes from the banks, not the merchants. It’s about data.
They’re doing this so they can pursue a system that is less secure (third-party apps don’t have access to the secure element where Apple Pay stores your credit card data, for one thing), less convenient (QR codes?), and not private.
I don’t know that CVS and Rite Aid disabling Apple Pay out of spite is going to drive customers to switch pharmacies (Walgreens is an Apple Pay partner), but I do know that CurrentC is unlikely to ever gain any traction whatsoever.&
The relationship between the iPad and the iPhone, performance-wise, has been hard to predict. I often point out that Apple is a company of annual patterns, often predictable. There’s not much of a pattern with regard to how the iPad and iPhone relate to one another.
Two years ago, when the original iPad Mini debuted, it was roughly a year behind its 9.7-inch sibling, the iPad 4. The original Mini had a non-retina display and A5 system-on-a-chip (SoC). In broad strokes, Apple took an iPad 2 and shrunk it to fit in a much smaller form factor. The iPad 4 had a retina display and an A6 SoC — and double the RAM (1 GB vs. 512 MB), a better camera, etc.
Last year, the new models were roughly all on par CPU/GPU-wise, with the A7 SoC running at about the same speed on all three devices: iPad Air, iPad Mini 2, and iPhone 5S. The Air had one small advantage over the other two devices: it was clocked at 1400 MHz instead of 1300 MHz, which gave it . The iPhone 5S had unique niceties, though, maintaining its clear position as the king of the iOS hill: a far superior camera and Touch ID, to name just two. The Air had better color gamut than the Mini, but I think it was very fair to say () that they were more or less the same iPad in two different sizes. The main thing you got when you paid the extra $100 for last year’s Air (versus the comparably-equipped Mini) was the size of the display.
This year, all previous patterns are busted.
The new iPad Mini 3 really just gets two things: Touch ID and a gold case option. Really, that’s it. Everything else about it remains unchanged.
The iPad Air 2, though, is entirely new. It’s a thorough refresh, that not only makes it a nice year-over-year improvement over last year’s iPad Air in just about every single regard, but arguably positions it above the iPhones 6 as the top-tier iOS device, period.
Let’s talk performance. The iPhones 6 still have just 1 GB of RAM. The iPad Air 2 has 2 GB. The iPhone’s A8 SoC has 2 billion transistors and two cores. The iPad Air 2’s A8X SoC has 3 billion transistors. According to , Apple achieved this by going from two CPU cores to three. And the Geekbench benchmark results bear this out:
Geekbench 3 Results
Single Core
Multi Core
iPad Air 2
iPad Air 1
11-inch MacBook Air (2011)
11-inch MacBook Air (2012)
13-inch MacBook Pro (2014)
(The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are so nearly identical in Geekbench results that I simply averaged the two together under “iPhones 6”.)
The Air 2 is noticeably faster than the iPhones 6 in single-core performance, but it’s simply in an altogether different ballpark in multi-core. I couldn’t get an answer from anyone at Apple regarding whether Geekbench is correct that it’s a three-core CPU, but the multi-core results certainly bear that out.
It is remarkable not only that the new iPad Air 2 is faster than the iPhones 6, but also that it’s faster than a three-year-old MacBook Air, and within shooting distance of a two-year-old MacBook Air. It’s more than half as fast as today’s top-of-the-line 13-inch MacBook Pro, especially in multi-core. (Let’s not get carried away regarding this apparent third core. Single-core performance is a better measure for most of the things typical consumers do on an iPad. But still.)
Geekbench is just a benchmark, but I think it’s a fair one for a general comparison of “how fast” machines are, including machines that run entirely different operating systems.
But Geekbench only measures CPU performance — year-over-year, the iPad Air 2 is even more impressive in terms of GPU performance. , “The A8X chip has an astonishing 2.5 times the graphics performance of the A7 chip,” and from what I’ve seen, that’s true.
The iPad is no longer following in the wake of the iPhone, performance- and specs-wise. It’s forging ahead. With 2 GB of RAM, it’s a year ahead of the iPhone (we hope) in that department. Performance-wise it’s fast enough to replace a MacBook Air for many, many people. The demos that Apple chose for last week’s event — the
image editor and
real-time video editor — emphasize that. Those are performance-heavy tasks, and the iPad Air 2 handled them with aplomb.
The other factor is , Apple’s new low-level graphics API, which is (at least for now) iOS-only. Apple promotes it as being 10 times faster than OpenGL. For games and creative productivity apps that take advantage of Metal — and developers of both seem to be buying in — the iPad Air 2 might be on even footing today with the MacBook Air. It really is desktop-PC-level performance.
In short, I don’t think performance is any longer a reason to buy a MacBook Air instead of an iPad Air. The choice comes down to form factor and personal preference. This marks a turning point.
iPad as Camera
The original iPad in 2010
— not on the front, not on the back. Now, the iPad Air 2 has both a FaceTime camera and a rear-facing (“iSight”) camera that, to my eyes, produces images with quality somewhere between that of the iPhone 5 and 5S. It suffers in low light compared to the 5S, but in sunshine, it’s pretty close.
Apple didn’t anticipate people loving to use their iPads as cameras. I certainly didn’t either. But they do, and now Apple is embracing iPad photography. And for whatever the iPad Air 2 camera lacks optically, it makes up for many things through software. Again, I think the Pixelmator/Replay demos were carefully chosen — not only did they show off the Air 2’s computational performance, they exemplified the sort of apps you might want to use if you’re using the iPad as a camera. Shoot, edit, filter, publish and share — all from one device. You can do the same from an iPhone too, but other than the optical quality of the camera (where the iPhone 6 still has a noticeable edge), the iPad is the better machine for everything else. It’s faster, and its bigger display is better for composing new shots and examining/editing the shots you’ve already taken.
And then there’s the social aspect. The iPad camera has spawned an entirely new class of applications for teachers and coaches. Apple showed a clip of
during the event last week, to name one very popular example. The iPad’s size enables a teacher and pupil, a coach and player, to share the display in a way that isn’t practical on a phone (even the 6 Plus).
When the iPad debuted in 2010, the primary question was what sort of things
would we want to use them for instead of our iPhones and laptops. The answers vary by taste. Email, web browsing, watching video — a lot of the things we used to do on phones and laptops we now do on tablets.
Using the camera, in conjunction with smart software, as an instructional aid is something else: brand-new territory. Something only a tablet is suited for.
The iPad 3 was the first to go retina, and it was glorious to behold. But at 1.46 pounds, it was not so glorious to just plain hold. Not only was that 50 grams heavier than the iPad 2, it was 0.6 mm thicker. Apple products get thinner and lighter over time, not thicker and heavier. (The iPad 4, released just six months after the 3, was the same size and weight. It had better performances and switched the 30-pin adapter (gross, right?) for Lightning.)
Two years later, the iPad Air 2 is an entire half pound lighter than the iPad 3 was (0.98 pounds, down from 1.46) and 33 percent thinner (6.1 mm, down from 9.4 mm). A one-third reduction in thickness and weight in just two and a half years — with the same battery life, incredible performance increases (see above), and vastly improved cameras. The camera quality deserves special recognition, because, all things considered, the image quality of a camera tends to be inversely proportional to the distance between the lens and the sensor. (That’s why the iPhone 6 has a lens that juts out from the back of its frame.)
Yet the iPad Air 2 got thinner and its camera quality has increased. Part of that is that now that Apple is taking iPad photography more seriously, they’re using more expensive camera components. But part of it is due to things other than the camera lens and sensor. Face detection for auto-focus goes through the A8X’s image signal processor (presumably, the same ISP as on the iPhones 6), and the ISP plays a major role in noise reduction, burst mode, slo-mo, and more.
The end result is a markedly improved iPad, just in terms of it being an object you hold in your hands. It really does feel like we’re getting close to just holding a piece of glass. It’s very thin, very light, and very comfortable to hold. The improved display is a noticeable improvement over all previous iPads. Retina iPhone displays have been laminated to the glass touch screen ever since the first retina model (the iPhone 4, back in 2010). It really does feel like the difference between pixels-under-glass and pixels-on-glass. Now the iPad Air 2 offers the same thing, and it’s gorgeous. Even better, the iPad Air 2 one-ups the iPhone 6, with an anti-reflective coating. It’s quite noticeable, and very welcome. On a dark screen, it’s the difference between being able to see a reflection of my own face on the display, and being able only to see a silhouette of myself. I hope and expect this anti-reflective coating to spread to next year’s new iPhones and iPad Mini. The anti-reflective coating appearing on the iPad Air 2 first is another sign that the “new” iPhone is no longer the recipient of all new model-year improvements.
One other change is worth noting in the Air 2: Apple removed the “side switch” above the volume buttons. It was an on/off toggle that could be set to function as either a silent switch or a rotation lock (configurable in Settings). Now, it’s gone, and both those functions can only be controlled via the swipe-up-from-the-bottom-of-the-screen Control Center. I only ever used it as a silent switch, but I did use it. I’m curious what Apple’s rationale was for getting rid of it, because I thought it was useful.
Personal Preference
Everything Apple is promoting about the Air 2 is true, both in terms of what you can objectively measure, and in terms of how it feels to use it. It’s thinner, lighter, faster, and has a better display and better camera. And, yes, Touch ID is great, especially if you’ve been using it for the last year on your iPhone.
I don’t think I’m going to buy one, though.
For the last two years, my day-to-day iPad has been a Mini. I like the Mini form factor so much that I switched to the original non-retina model in late 2012 even after having used the retina iPad 3 for six months or so. In terms of visual acuity, that was painful. In terms of hold-ability, though, it was a huge win. Last year I didn’t hesitate to stick with the Mini form factor once it went retina.
I spent a lot of time in this review comparing the new Air 2 to the iPad 3/4. I think that’s fair, because normal people aren’t supposed to even consider replacing their iPads on an annual basis. And , iPad users aren’t even upgrading them as often as they do their iPhones. They’re more like PCs, where people use them for several years. Anyone upgrading from an iPad 3/4 to an iPad Air 2 is going to be delighted. Anyone upgrading from an iPad 2 or original iPad is going to be amazed.
If you already have an iPad Air, it’s obviously a closer call. From the outside, Touch ID looks like the biggest change, but I’d actually rank it behind the improved display (lamination and anti-glare) and CPU/GPU performance in terms of how big a difference it makes in use. And the biggest change of all might be the
reduction in weight and thickness. If you hold your iPad for long stretches of time, it really makes a difference.
But I still prefer the Mini form factor. I’m not saying it’s better in general — only that it’s better for me, personally. More than anything else, I mostly read on my iPad. When I do type on my iPad, I tend to do it iPhone-style with just my thumbs. For reading, the Air comes close to being a better iPad for me. After just four days of testing it, my iPad Mini already feels a little thick. But for typing, I’m far more comfortable with the Mini.
Which brings me to the new iPad Mini 3. Apple loaned me one of those to test alongside the Air 2. There’s really not much to review, though. Touch ID and the gold color option really are the only differences from the last year’s iPad Mini 2. Here’s what I wrote last year, :
So the iPad Air is an excellent year-over-year update over the
iPad 4 — double the performance, and a serious reduction in
size and weight. But the retina iPad Mini is an almost
unbelievable year-over-year update — four times the
performance, a retina display (which therefore means four times
the pixels), and yet no appreciable difference in size or
weight. This is the iPad Mini I expected to see next year, in
2014. But here it is today, in my hand.
Turns out I was right — we did get this year’s iPad Mini a year early. And now we still have it. But that’s OK. I think the sort of person who prefers the Mini form factor is less likely to be using their iPad in the ways that the iPad Air 2 is improved. (Anecdotally, most
I see in the real world are using 9.7-inch iPads, not the Mini.) And the sort of iPad users who are pushing the performance limits of the platform are the sort of people who’ve preferred the 9.7-inch models all along. In short, I think the Mini really is more of a pure consumption device, and the Air is more of an alternative to a MacBook.
Choosing a Model
I’ve seen
that Apple now offers too many iPad models to choose from. The array of iPads for sale — three generations, two sizes, four storage tiers (16/32/64/128), and cellular-vs.Wi-Fi-only — is certainly not simple. But I don’t think it’s that tough for a would-be iPad buyer to decide. I’d say there are only four questions:
What size — Mini or Air?
What color?
How much more money do you want to spend?
If you answer yes to question 3, you have to answer another question: Which carrier? But with , that’s no longer a long-term commitment unless you choose Verizon.
Question 4 is the tricky one, because you have to evaluate multiple factors, all of which cost additional money: performance, Touch ID, thinness/weight, and of course storage capacity.
It’s not so much that Apple has complicated the iPad lineup, as that they’ve expanded it downward into lower price points. They now have models ranging from $249 (the A5-based original iPad Mini, a.k.a. ) to $829 (the 128 GB cellular Air 2). At any given price point, there aren’t many decisions to make beyond color. I don’t know that that’s any harder a decision to make than buying a MacBook, especially once you factor in the various build-to-order upgrades that MacBooks offer.
Storage Tiers
On that last point, I’ll reiterate
regarding the iPhone lineup. Apple should not be selling 16 GB iPads. The starting tier for typical consumers should be 32 GB. There’s just not enough usable space on a 16 GB iOS device to do the things Apple has worked so hard to make easy to do. High-def slo-mo video? Panoramic photos? Console-quality games? Those things all consume large amounts of space.
I heard from a few DF readers in education and the enterprise who said that their organizations buy 16 GB iPads and they all have plenty of free space to spare. It’d be a waste to force them to buy 32 GB models. I have no doubt that’s true. And I have no doubt there are millions of consumers for whom 16 GB is more than enough storage. But I don’t think it’s enough for the majority of typical iPad users, and that’s what matters.
I also understand the product marketing angle. That there are a lot of people who will look at the 16 GB models, see that they can get four times the storage for just $100 more, and buy the 64 GB model instead — when they would’ve bought the base model if it were 32 GB. I get it. There’s no doubt in my mind it’s good short-term business sense to go with a 16/64/128 lineup instead of 32/64/128. But Apple is not a short-term business. They’re a long-term business, built on a relationship of trust with repeat customers. 16 GB iPads work against the foundation of Apple’s brand, which is that they only make good products.
Apple has long used three-tier pricing structures within individual product categories. They often used to label them “Good”, “Better”, and “Best”. Now, with these 16 GB entry-level devices, it’s more like “Are you sure?”, “Better”, and “Best”. Fine, keep the 16 GB models around for expert business and education buyers who know that they really don’t need more storage space. But don’t put devices on the tables in Apple retail stores that you wouldn’t recommend as a good product and good value to typical customers.
If you’re on the fence about buying a 16 or 64 GB new iPad, especially the Air 2, I strongly encourage you to spring the extra $100 for the 64 GB. You’ll thank me later.&
Copyright &
The Daring Fireball Company LLC.