tectiv3

All for One, One for All

This was it: one big event for all of Apple’s late 2015 product announcements. In the previous three years, Apple held separate events in September (iPhone) and October (iPad/Mac). They’ve done this because they typically have more to announce than would fit comfortably in one event. As I wrote yesterday, I thought they’d have two events again this year, because it looked like they once again had more stuff ready to announce than would fit, comfortably, in one event.

To do just one event, something had to give. One casualty was the Mac. Other than a few offhand references to things that work with features in Mac OS X, the Mac got no stagetime whatsover. El Capitan’s only public demo will have been at WWDC back in June. Whatever new Macs get released this year (retina 21-inch iMac, updated MacBook Pros?) will be announced via press releases.

The second casualty was my bladder. Today’s event ran 2h:20m, including the musical performance by One Republic. That’s long. Not ridiculously long. Not too long, even. But long. It couldn’t have gone any longer — and from what I’ve gathered from a few little birdies, Apple had to cut a lot during rehearsals to get it down to the length it ran.

My guess is that one event, in early September, is going to be the new normal. I gather that Apple has decided that putting all of its wood behind one fall event arrow, even if it means that they have to cut worthy products from getting any stage time, is better than spreading themselves too thin with two events in short succession.

Staging

Everything visible inside the Bill Graham Center was installed by Apple. Most of the structure was built just for the event. They even bought all the seating — you should probably contact Apple if you’re looking to buy theater seating. Effectively, Apple designed and built their own custom theater just for this event. It looked great. Especially the screen — that was the biggest and best screen I can recall at an Apple event. The acoustics and sound quality were excellent as well.

There were around 1,500 people in the audience — but at least 1,000 were Apple employees. That’s new — there have never been that many Apple employees at one of these events before, with the possible exception of last year’s event at the Flint Center. At a smaller venue like Yerba Buena or Apple’s tiny on-campus Town Hall, there just isn’t enough room. At WWDC (and in years past, Macworld Expo) Moscone is filled with paid ticket holders. Having that many employees in the room changes the tenor of the audience considerably — the cheering and applause were raucous.

In terms of stagecraft, this event was really well-structured and edited. That’s in stark contrast to June’s WWDC keynote, which was, by Apple’s standards, a bit of a rambling mess. In hindsight, I think this year’s WWDC keynote was the worst Apple event in years, and perhaps the worst in the modern (post-NeXT reunification) Apple era. It was too long, had no flow between acts/segments, and the Apple Music segment was downright awkward and under-rehearsed.

One of the reasons I didn’t expect to see iPad Pro announced at this event is that I thought adding a fourth act (in addition to iPhone, Watch, and TV) would make the show feel messy, like that WWDC keynote. Apple did add a fourth act, but there was a tight flow and it felt like there was a logical order to the segments. It felt like a show that had four acts, not just four announcements stitched together.

I have never been in the “Apple is doomed without Steve Jobs” camp, but I did long wonder whether Apple would suffer gravely without Jobs when it came to these keynotes. Not that Jobs, the presenter, was irreplaceable — even though, without question, he was the best stage presence, a genuine rock star. Apple has plenty of good presenters. It was Jobs the director, writer, and editor who I worried Apple would miss. The keynote auteur. Steve Jobs could look at a list of products and announcements and he knew how to structure an event around them. During rehearsals, Jobs had final cut over everything: what was announced, in what order, at what pace — every word, every slide. He had a knack for it.

It’s often painfully obvious that the public presentations of big companies are dictated by internal politics more than showmanship. Jobs had the unquestioned stature to settle any such arguments, and his innate showmanship allowed him to keep the focus relentlessly on putting together a good cohesive show. I think we saw a drift away from that cohesiveness back at WWDC this year.

Today’s event was a welcome course correction — and given the breadth of the announcements, it was all the more impressive.

Apple Watch

The expansion of color options for Apple’s sport bands was predictable, but it’s smart. With the addition of two new anodized colors for the Sport watches (gold and a feminine-but-not-girly rose gold), the complete product matrix for all the various watch straps, watch sizes, and watch finishes is remarkably complex. I think it’s a good example, though, of a product matrix that is complex but not complicated. People know what they like when they see it.

The Apple Watch Hermès is interesting. I speculated back in May that luxury brands like Tiffany and Louis Vuitton might make watch bands for Apple Watch. This is even better — a full-on partnership between Apple and a luxury fashion brand, including a custom branded watch face. (How will that work? A custom Hermès build of WatchOS — sort of like the individual per-carrier builds of iOS for iPhones? Or will WatchOS only offer the Hermès watch face on watches within a specific serial number / device ID range?) The Hermès straps are gorgeous.

I still think Tiffany is a good bet for a similar partnership. They have a signature color that would look great on a woman’s watch strap. Gucci would be a great fit, too. And of course Burberry, for obvious reasons. In theory, Louis Vuitton would work, but in practice it might prove politically unfeasible, because Louis Vuitton is the “LV” in LVMH, the French luxury mega-conglomerate¹ that owns luxury watch brands like TAG Heuer, Hublot, Zenith, and others.

iPad Pro

Apple called the A9X “desktop class”, and that’s not hyperbole. They said it outperforms 80 percent of laptops sold in the last 12 months — and 90 percent of them in graphics. But, let’s face it, the vast majority of “laptops” are piece of crap PCs. What’s impressive is that the iPad Pro will compare favorably to very recent MacBooks. I think it’ll benchmark comparably to, say, a 2013 MacBook Air. I wouldn’t be surprised if the iPad Pro outperforms the Intel Core-based Surface Pro 3 from Microsoft. iPad Pro might be the inflection point where Apple’s ARM chips surpass Intel’s x86 in terms of raw speed for this class of hardware — and if it doesn’t, next year’s A10X will.

As with other iPads and iPhones, Apple won’t talk about RAM, even though developers will be able to find out as soon as they get their hands on them. If we were to wager on the amount of RAM in iPad Pro, my bet would be 4 GB. And I would wager very heavily.

Apple TV

Apple TV is hot. I only got a brief period to play with it, but it seems fast, responsive, beautiful, and intuitive. It feels alive. If I worked at Apple I’d want to be on that team. On first impression, it is everything I wanted to see. It sounds like a small talented team got to build the Apple TV they wanted to see and use themselves. There is a clarity and vision to the entirety of its design. I think it exemplifies the best of Apple.

The new Apple TV seems great for both video consumption and casual gaming. The MLB At Bat demo during the event was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Not just because I’m a baseball fan, but because it presented a revolutionary way to watch live events, period. I think Apple TV might be the most disruptive product from Apple since the iPhone. Not the most lucrative, necessarily, but the most disruptive — in the sense of defining how all TVs will work in a few years.

iPhone 6S / 6S Plus

“3D Touch” is the new “Force Touch” (Craig Federighi slipped at one point, saying “force” before correcting himself.) I’ve seen concerns that this overcomplicates the iPhone’s UI design, but I would argue the opposite. It’s the multi-touch equivalent of keyboard shortcuts on the desktop: shortcuts for tasks that can all be accomplished without it. To use the old parlance, 3D Touch is for power users.

The taptic feedback feels great. Apple calls the two levels “peek” and “pop”. They definitely feel different. Peek is like the half-press on a camera shutter to auto-focus, and pop is the full-press to take a picture. Pop feels stronger. And, for 3D touch UI elements that only have one level, you feel the pop right away, giving you haptic feedback that you need not try pressing harder, because you’re already all the way in. The taptic engine also serves as the vibrator for notifications, and I suspect that’s going to be a big improvement over the rinky-dink vibrator in every iPhone since the iPhone 4.

One small camera bummer: just like last year, optical image stabilization is only available on the Plus. And on the 6S Plus, it’s even better: OIS now works for video (up to 1080p) in addition to stills — Apple had a demo video shot while hiking on a trail and it looked really smooth.

I very much liked the iPhone 6S commercial: “The only thing that’s changed is everything.” It head-on addresses the knee-jerk criticism that the 6S/Plus look like last year’s 6/Plus by showing people using all the new features, all of which are pretty cool.

Celestial Jewelry:

hpotterfacts:

Check out the Storenvy I just opened! Looking to get rid of cute, old earrings! Very affordable! 

Eric Raymond:

This isn’t speculation — an Apple employee copied Sony’s design, circulated it to his bosses, and testified to these facts in court.

From now on, when anyone heaps phrase on Apple’s design excellence and superlative innovation, just point and laugh. Some of us have been saying for years that what Apple is really good at is ripping off other peoples’ ideas and stealing the credit for them with slick marketing. This, right here, is the proof.

This whole “iPhone design inspired by Sony” (or, as these guys put it, “Apple Stole iPhone Design From Sony, Patented It And Sued Everyone Else”) argument from Samsung has a lot of people confused.

Here’s the relevant portion from Samsung’s pre-trial brief (PDF):

For its part, Apple’s “revolutionary” iPhone design was derived from the designs of a competitor — Sony. In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived of, Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, a Sony designer discussed Sony designs for portable electronic devices that lacked buttons and other “excessive ornamentation,” fit in the hand, were “square with a screen” and had “corners [which] have been rounded out.” Right after this article was circulated internally, Apple industrial designer Shin Nishibori was directed to prepare a “Sony-like” design for an Apple phone and then had CAD drawings and a three-dimensional model prepared. Confirming the origin of the design, these internal Apple CAD drawings prepared at Mr. Nishibori‘s direction even had the “Sony” name prominently emblazoned on the phone design, as the below images from Apple‘s internal documents show:

The Verge has an image gallery of the “Sony” phone in question. Here’s the thing, though — it’s not a Sony phone. It’s an in-house mockup by an Apple designer inspired by a very broad description of Sony devices. There is no actual circa 2006 Sony phone that looks like this. [Update: Here’s more on the Samsung-cited Businessweek interview with two Sony designers, including the relevant passage, which was actually in response to a question about how much Sony’s design had been inspired by, of all things, the iPod.]

Via John Paczkowski, here’s the actual Sony phone Samsung is claiming Apple copied for the iPhone. Yeah, that’s a dead ringer for the iPhone.

Feel free to continue believing what you want to believe about how original the iPhone design was (here’s a 2005 design by Apple, another fascinating nugget revealed by this lawsuit), but don’t make the mistake of thinking this “Sony” mockup was an actual Sony phone or even a Sony concept. It was an Apple concept showing what a Sony phone might look like.

Cast your vote for the next book I write!

http://shilesque.deviantart.com/

It seems like another era, but back in the ’00s, major new-cat-name updates of Mac OS X were a big deal. They were packed with major new features, new built-in apps, significant performance improvements, and often sported refreshed system-wide UI appearances (the long slow fading out of the 10.0 horizontal stripes; the meteoric rise and ignominious demise of our old friend Brushed Metal). We waited in line at Apple Stores to buy them.

They were extravaganzas, and they were priced accordingly at $129. Enthusiasts paid, but many on the consumer side of the Mac market waited until they replaced their machines to get on board with major new versions of the OS.

This changed in 2009 with Snow Leopard, which Apple touted not for its new features or visible changes, but for its under-the-hood improvements. Snow Leopard was, technically and performance-wise, a rousing success, but Apple wisely didn’t try charging the usual $129, instead pricing it at just $29. It was a wise and practical decision, marketing implications be damned, to devote over a year of engineering effort to under-the-hood OS infrastructure. A solid technical foundation is good for everyone — users, Apple, developers alike. But it’s a hard sell — like opening a restaurant that serves nutritious entrees but no desserts. It worked though. Users and critics alike deservedly praised Snow Leopard.

Last year with Lion, Apple added a slew of new features to the OS — some of them highly visible, such as Launchpad and Mission Control — but kept the price at $29. The biggest change was distributing the Lion installer through the App Store. The result: record-breaking adoption. Apple claims 40 percent of Macs were running Lion within 9 months of its release. That’s low by iOS standards — and keep in mind iOS updates are free — but very high in the context of desktop computing history. Apple claims it took Windows 7 26 months — three times longer — to reach 40 percent of the PC installed base, and Windows 7 is the most popular and highly-touted version of Windows in over a decade.

Now, a year later, we’ve got Mountain Lion, and it brings the upgrade cost ever lower to $19.99. That’s great. It encourages users to get on board with the latest and greatest, and I expect the result of this pricing (and the ease of doing so through the App Store) will be a record-breaking (which is to say, faster than Lion) adoption rate.

But what exactly do users get for their twenty bucks? In short: a nicer, more polished version of Lion. There’s definitely new stuff: iCloud document storage (more on that in a bit), Messages (which is more than just a renamed version of iChat — it supports iMessage), Notification Center (which I really like on the Mac; it’s perhaps the feature I’ve missed the most over the last few months testing the Mountain Lion betas when going back to my main machine running Lion). More back-to-the-Mac stuff from iOS, like standalone apps for Notes and Reminders, and convenient system-wide “share sheets” for sending content via email or messages and to websites like Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, and soon, Facebook. (Facebook integration is not included in OS X 10.8; Apple says it will come in a software update “this fall”.) AirPlay Mirroring is a gem of a feature — a shining example of Apple’s “all our stuff works together seamlessly” philosophy. The new voice dictation feature is accurate, simple, and convenient — a huge accessibility win for anyone who has trouble typing.

But Mountain Lion isn’t billed as a blockbuster release, and it isn’t priced like one. It’s just nicer. And it’s the little things, the attention to detail, that show it best. I’ve spent most of my time testing Mountain Lion on a 2010 11-inch MacBook Air. I’ve noticed that wake-from-sleep times have gotten faster over the course of the beta period. And the MacBook Air woke from sleep just fine on Lion, by the historical standards of Apple notebooks waking from sleep. But “faster” isn’t fast enough, and the Air now feels like it’s getting pretty close to the instant-on wake-from-sleep feel of an iOS device.

Even the Finder has gotten some love. Copy a big folder or file and the progress bar is drawn right on top of the folder or file’s icon. Contextual information right where it’s most applicable. Some engineer spent time making copying files in the Finder a more pleasing experience.

But to understand what Mountain Lion really is, you really need to look at it not as a standalone OS release, but as a step in a series of releases. Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion — none of these have been radical releases of Mac OS X.¹ But taken together, there have been some radical changes to the Mac experience over the last five years: the App Store, sandboxing, and iCloud to name a few. Apple has introduced these features incrementally, which I think has been a win for them engineering-wise, allowing them to roll features out annually rather than queue them all up for one blockbuster major OS release. But it’s also been a win for users, introducing significant changes at a relatively gradual pace.

Take iCloud documents in the cloud. Use Mountain Lion and its built-in apps like TextEdit and Preview for a few hours and it is very clear that this is how Apple wants users to deal with documents and app content. It’s a radical change from the nearly 30-year-old file-system-centric approach to data management on the Mac. The old way: go to the Finder, find the file you want, and open it. The new way: go to the app and open the document from within the app. Conceptually it works just like iOS — your files aren’t in the file system, but rather “in” the app you used to create them. This is the future, but Apple isn’t forcing it upon us. The feature is prominent, yes, because Apple wants us to use it. But it is far from mandatory. Don’t want to use iCloud document storage? Then just keep on managing your files exactly as before. Apple’s not dragging us to the future; they’re enticing us to walk there on our own.

(Other things to note about iCloud documents: drag and drop works as you’d expect. So, yes, if you create a text file using TextEdit, it’s “in” TextEdit conceptually. But when you see it in TextEdit’s iCloud document picker window, you can just drag it out and drop it on another app, and the file will open just fine. Or you can drag it to your desktop or a Finder window. Behind the scenes an iCloud document is really just a file on your Mac with a path like ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~TextEdit/Documents/Foo.txt. I expected this to feel like a bigger change than it does. Instead it just feels like a simple default folder for each app’s files. I find myself saving fewer scratch documents to my desktop. I’ve always saved files to the desktop when I didn’t want to bother thinking about where they should go. Now, with iCloud documents, it’s like each (iCloud-supporting) app has its own private desktop.)

Mountain Lion, and the incremental approach Apple has taken with recent OS X updates, highlights the growing schism between Apple’s and Microsoft’s philosophies. Windows 8, in contrast to Mountain Lion, is a radical update — years in the works and it introduces a slew of truly disruptive changes to the user experience. Mountain Lion and iOS 6 certainly share a slew of features and code, and through iCloud are growing to support a single cross-device experience. But they are very much two different and distinct systems, one for traditional keyboard and pointer device personal computers, and another for touchscreen mobile devices. One for trucks, one for cars, to borrow Steve Jobs’s analogy.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is clearly betting everything on their single OS strategy. We’ll see how that goes. But in terms of their traditional blockbuster “It’s taken us a few years but here’s something totally new and different” approach to major OS releases, I’m not sure that’s sustainable. Windows 8 might be the last. How else can they compete with the iPad but than to switch to an Apple-style schedule of annual incremental updates?

That mindset and development schedule — “What can we do to make this nicer by next year?” — may well be the most important thing from iOS that Apple has taken back to the Mac.

1. You could argue, perhaps, that the one and only truly radical version of Mac OS X was 10.0 in 2001. If they had it to do all over again, I suspect Apple might have dropped the upgrade price far below $129 starting with 10.2. ↩