iOS 11 Early Returns

Some first thoughts on iOS 11:

• Appears to fix problems with Reminders not synchronizing in the cloud (but let's give it a while, this always worked well in the first day or so after a reboot).
• UI changes are a mixed bag:
  • Round buttons for the calculator vs. a grid before, meh. This appears in multiple locations.
  • Email has a much more visible (but real estate-hungry) bold title for each mailbox.
  • The Control Center is now super busy, partially reverting to the status quo of iOS 6 (and 7?) where individual apps all had control of audio out (the AirPlay logo that occupied a tiny piece of each app's real estate). I find this not only confusing but annoying; if volume is still in the Control Center, why not audio out? 
• The ability to select which part of a Live Photo (still photos are now stored as short video clips) looks like it should be great, and overdue; this should have been rolled out once Apple started storing stills as Live Photos.
• The Health app still sucks, failing to deliver core functionality that has been part of FitBit and other fitness wearables for years. Particularly, the only place one can set goals is inside the Apple Watch's tiny user interface. A horrible, horrible design flaw that makes the Apple Watch almost unusable as a fitness tracker.
• Air Play 2 adds a functionality long available in Sonos products, the ability to play the same music on multiple speakers throughout the house. This is better developed in MacOS iTunes 12.7.0, but the fact that they're doing it at all is a good sign.
• Battery life takes a huge hit, with Wandera reporting battery consumption twice the rate of iOS 10.
• I have also had problems with iOS 11 interacting with my Ford SYNC for music. SYNC will play any given song for 20 seconds and then stop. It exacerbates a long-extant problem forgetting which song in which playlist is active, and starting at the top of the alphabetical song list when first plugged in to the truck's USB port by doing this if you push the vehicle's play button after the song stops. A horrible failure that can be worked around by using Bluetooth audio at the cost of some (mostly unnoticeable) compression.
  
  Update 15:44: It appears that this problem is now gone.

The Apple Watch: Married In Haste, Repent At Leisure

I open this piece by noting I have had three other fitness trackers, all Fitbits:

• I started with the Flex, which was then at the price point and functionality the best available unit on the market. It suffered from horrible mechanical defects, particularly in its charging port, which became less and less stable over time. This was made even worse by the incredibly tiny cable that came with the unit. If the distance between the outlet to the nearest horizontal surface was larger than that, you could be assured the Flex would sooner or later (the older it got, the sooner) it would fall out.
• The second Fitbit unit I owned was a Force. Again, mechanical issues with the charging port caused me to abandon it, unlike a number of owners who had contact allergic dermatitis with the surgical stainless steel bezel.
• The third (and last?) unit was a Surge. Shockingly, it wasn't actually issues with the charging port that caused me to abandon it, but the wristband. The thing simply broke in two, and because of the nonstandard, single-piece construction, could not be replaced.

Thus Fitbit. Since Apple had previously given me a number of products I have used and enjoyed dating back to the Apple II days, I finally broke down and decided to get an Apple Watch. Also, because the Apple Watch had (so they claimed) fitness functions mirroring the more popular ones available in the many fitness tracking devices now available. Mainly, I looked forward to Apple's superior history of making mechanically bulletproof devices. It's been a mixed bag.

• There's really no way to change step count or other fitness-related targets outside the watch's tiny user interface itself. This is, to put it mildly, extremely annoying for those of us with big man fingers. On the Fitbit, you had the option of making these changes on either the iPhone or website interfaces, but Apple doesn't even offer an iCloud web interface for their fitness functions.
• The limited touchscreen size means a great deal rests on various gestures. Unfortunately, it is too easy to accidentally engage one of them and change something inadvertently. I have several times turned on my watch, only to discover that the watch face has changed, or some other app has randomly taken over the display (because it was engaged accidentally last).
• I had a worst case scenario of this happen yesterday when my Watch made an unwanted 911 call for me! I had my wrist bent at 90°, and next thing I know, the phone's making a call to the local emergency dispatcher! This apparently is some kind of default, something I had to shamefacedly explain to the woman from the dispatcher's office who called me back because I hung up after making the call. (I have since disabled the default dial-911 state.)
• Those glaring flaws notwithstanding, it's got some nice features. Particularly, the ability to answer calls (with lousy sound quality) is useful, especially if you don't immediately know where your phone is. Likewise the ability to control your music, if the phone must be somewhere else than on your person, the best thing if you're using Bluetooth. (The low power Bluetooth interface can be spotty if there's any large enough physical thing between transmitter and receiver... like a human bent in half, say.)

By far, it's not a good replacement for the Fitbit, and in fact is so weak in this area it probably shouldn't be on anyone's list for this purpose. Since launch, Apple has treated it like an afterthought, especially in the way it interacts with apps. A disappointment, especially at the price, which may be one reason Apple has materially dropped the price for its entry level watch to well below $200.

With The iPhone 7, Apple Turns On Its Customers

Somewhere, Apple fanboys (and -girls) defend the recently announced iPhone 7's lack of a 3.5mm audio jack; so far, I'm not seeing it. It's part of a long line of decisions eliminating older technology in favor of something better and newer, e.g. ditching floppy disks ahead of the rest of the industry, or less successfully, the transition from the 30-pin iPhone/iPod connector to the proprietary, reversible, and faster Lightning cable. But that cable transition has not gone nearly as smoothly as Apple would have hoped. Why is it that Apple's Lightning cables suck so badly? Apple used to sell excellent 30-pin cables, but their Lightning cables fray at the strain relief, and die young compared to quality third party cables. This is a big part of the reason people rail against the jackless 7:

It's all too easy to mock Apple's overgrown sense of entitlement here; the replacement for the free headphones that used to ship with prior iPhones is, um, a little spendier:

AirPods cost $159, which is a very courageous price.

— nilay patel (@reckless) September 7, 2016

As ever, emboldening below is all mine:

Geoffrey Stormzand, who spent three years managing the in-office technology for none other than Steve Jobs in Cupertino, admits that he scolds his wife over how many cords she goes through. But he also concedes it shouldn’t be so challenging for normal people using the devices in normal ways to keep them working.

“I wonder if the reason Apple doesn’t see the problems with the cables is because they treat them with the respect they deserve and don’t consider the cables to something they need to test,” says Stormzand, now an Apple technology consultant in Las Vegas. “There’s a number of things you look at and say, ‘Steve would’ve raised hell about this.’ This might be one.”

And, one gets the sense that the wins for the all-digital iPhone 7 are not nearly going to be as positive as Apple might like, but customer blowback could be significant. Company flacks already dismiss the obvious direction this points Apple toward as so much "conspiracy theory". The advantages come down to

• One less ingress point for water, so easier to waterproof
• Less space occupied by external connectors, so more internal real estate for battery and camera

"It’s debatable whether they are good enough arguments," Patel writes, "but there is no denying that Apple has its reasons." Other reasons, of course, are not hard to find, and they look a lot like they think their customers have turned into milk cows:

... Let’s leave aside the many arguments that simply asking consumers to deal with additional dongles and potentially buy new accessories because Apple wanted to make the phone smaller is fairly aggressive behavior. Let’s just focus on that DRM conspiracy instead.

1. Apple already runs a DRM-encumbered music service. It is called, you know, Apple Music. The step from streaming DRM music to authenticated devices to only allowing those devices to output that music to approved audio peripherals is vanishingly small, and the sort of insane demand that record labels are organizationally designed to make. Apple may not want to DRM audio devices, but the record labels might certainly demand it, especially now that they can. Record labels love to exert control just because they can!
2. Apple already runs the Made For iPhone program, which charges accessory makers a fee for the use of the Lightning connector, a connector which contains — surprise! — an authentication chip. It’s not particularly sophisticated, but it’s there, and that means anyone who wants to make Lightning audio devices for the new iPhone will have to have those devices approved and pay Apple at least some money per unit.
3. If an accessory maker wants to make a contraband Lightning device, Apple might figure out how to disable that device in a future software update, which the company did with some unauthorized cables in iOS 7.
4. When we plugged the Apple Lightning-to-headphone-jack adapter into an iPhone 6S at the Apple Event, it popped up a warning saying the device was unsupported and didn’t work, because the phone wasn’t running iOS 10 yet. It is not simply a passive adapter; it requires software support.
5. The thing about any digital signal chain controlled by software is that it can be controlled by software, and that means all of the problems inherent to software are present. That means small things like bugs and incompatibilities, but it also means big things like the richest corporation in the world having the power to decide which devices its software can talk to.
6. Apple’s vision of the future is wireless audio, and the current foundation of that vision is Bluetooth, which means any Bluetooth device can theoretically get audio out of an iPhone. That’s great — but the best wireless audio experience available in the Apple ecosystem come from either Apple’s AirPods or its new Beats headphones, which use Apple’s proprietary W1 chip atop the Bluetooth protocol. The step from "buy Apple W1 products because they’re easier to use with an iPhone" to "the iPhone only supports officially approved W1 products because that’s all anyone really buys" is, again, vanishingly small.
7. Very few people will realistically switch to an Android device simply because of the headphone jack, so the amount of competitive power in the market that might meaningfully check Apple’s behavior is very low.

That is to say, Apple appears poised to follow Sony in making the kind of epic, DRM-fueled mistakes that put their content business ahead of their hardware, to the detriment of both. I hate to say it, but this may be the first iPhone I take a pass on.

Update 2016-09-10: This is hilarious:

Update 2016-09-10: Apple has a very sound financial interest in removing the jack: it owns the largest Bluetooth headphone company in the world, Beats.

...[T]he lack of a headphone jack on the iPhone — and increasingly, on Android phones as well — will lead to an uptick in sales of Bluetooth headphones. And it just so happens that Apple owns the number one Bluetooth headphone company, Beats.

Beats brings in more revenue from Bluetooth headphones than LG, Bose, or Jaybird, according to NPD figures released in July. In terms of unit sales, it controls over a quarter of the Bluetooth headphone market.

Bluetooth headphones are also disproportionately profitable among headphones. NPD has them accounting for 54 percent of all dollars spent in the market, despite representing only 17 percent of units sold in the US. These headphones sell at high prices with high margins, and Apple’s company is making the best of it so far.

The Arrogance Of Windows 10

Microsoft's Windows product has stumbled a great deal in the post-Bill Gates era, most notably with the disastrous rollout of Windows Vista (and its reputation for poor performance). Forcing people to upgrade to Windows 10 may eclipse everything that's ever happened before:

Microsoft has been trying to lure computer users into its new operating system for months, bombarding them with unending pop-up screens. But many users are comfortable with the systems they have, have no interest in learning new operations and have simply clicked the “X” to get rid of the unwanted solicitation.

You can’t do that anymore.

Microsoft changed the coding on the “X” so that clicking it now instructs MS to “upgrade” your computer to Windows 10. Yes, really.

In fact, the two options on the page, “OK” and “Upgrade Now,” do the same thing as the “X.”

To avoid the forced “upgrade,” a user has to go into the fine print.

Inside a logo box in the ad is a scheduled date for a mandatory upgrade. The user must look in the tiny type just below that line and find where it says “here” and click on that to avoid the upgrade.

In addition to engaging in clickbait-style user interface changes, this is deeply deceptive and wholly unacceptable by large users. I can't imagine an institutional Windows customer would stand still for this kind of forced upgrade. 

Apple Signals Its Craven Capitulation To FBI Backdoor Demands

Among civil libertarians, Apple has — hitherto — garnered many plaudits for its very public defiance of an FBI-obtained court order to create a new backdoor in iPhones, one that would allow anyone in possession of same to easily unlock the device. Apple's open letter to its customers makes very clear what is at stake:

Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.

The DOJ has invoked the All Writs Act, a very old, general-purpose law (emboldening mine):

It is essential to this story that the order to Apple is not a subpoena: it is issued under the All Writs Act of 1789, which says that federal courts can issue “all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” Read as a whole, this simply means that judges can tell people to follow the law, but they have to do so in a way that, in itself, respects the law. The Act was written at a time when a lot of the mechanics of the law still had to be worked out. But there are qualifications there: warnings about the writs having to be “appropriate” and “agreeable,” not just to the law but to the law’s “principles.” The government, in its use of the writ now, seems to be treating those caveats as background noise.  If it can tell Apple, which has been accused of no wrongdoing, to sit down and write a custom operating system for it, what else could it do?

 In fact, this legal strategy appears to have been decided upon when the political winds for legislation turn sour last year:

In a secret meeting convened by the White House around Thanksgiving, senior national security officials ordered agencies across the U.S. government to find ways to counter encryption software and gain access to the most heavily protected user data on the most secure consumer devices, including Apple Inc.’s iPhone, the marquee product of one of America’s most valuable companies, according to two people familiar with the decision.

The approach was formalized in a confidential National Security Council “decision memo,” tasking government agencies with developing encryption workarounds, estimating additional budgets and identifying laws that may need to be changed to counter what FBI Director James Comey calls the “going dark” problem: investigators being unable to access the contents of encrypted data stored on mobile devices or traveling across the Internet. Details of the memo reveal that, in private, the government was honing a sharper edge to its relationship with Silicon Valley alongside more public signs of rapprochement.

You might think that this would apply only to terrorism cases, but as Jim Comey made plain, the FBI intends to use such backdoors in even such common instances as car wrecks. So it was with great sadness I read a story today in Gizmodo that Tim Cook now is calling for the creation of a government commission to arbitrate the request. The reading I have of this is

1. He does not think Apple can win the court case.
2. He is perfectly aware of who would populate such a commission, i.e. surveillance state apologists who would immediately roll over for the government.

Which is to say, charges that Apple is making a show of opposing this order for purely commercial reasons appear now to have more weight than they did Friday. Jim Comey's cynical Lawfare blog post on the subject could be right, for the wrong reasons, but then, he's the one putting Apple's neck in a noose.

Footnote: Why did Gizmodo understand what's at stake here on Wednesday...

If Apple makes this software, it will allow the FBI to bypass security measures, including an auto-delete function that erases the key needed to decrypt data once a passcode is entered incorrectly after ten tries as well as a timed delay after each wrong password guess. Since the FBI wants to use the brute force cracking method—basically, trying every possible password—both of those protections need to go to crack Farook’s passcode. (Of course, if he used a shitty password like 1234, the delay wouldn’t be as big a problem, since the FBI could quickly guess.)

The security measures that the FBI wants to get around are crucial privacy features on iOS9, because they safeguard your phone against criminals and spies using the brute force attack. So it’s not surprising that Apple is opposing the court order. There is more than one person’s privacy at stake here!

... yet utterly forget it today?

The feds disagree. In a Sunday night editorial on Lawfare, a national security blog supported by the Brookings Institute, FBI director James Comey claims that the case “isn’t about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message.” Comey begs:

We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land.

So it’s a classic he-said-he-said situation. ...

No, it's not. Gizmodo got blinded by Comey's authoritarian lunacy. 

The Tragedy Of The Google Commons

The tragedy of the commons is that responsibility is divorced from individual profit, i.e. there's no feedback loop telling you to stop grazing your sheep because it's destroying the pasture. Large corporations have a similar problem internally with resource allocation, particularly ones as intrinsically entrepreneurial as Google (or as entrepreneurial as Google would like to think itself); with so many potential projects, which ones do you back? And how much? When none of these small projects are themselves expected to turn a profit, answering those questions is impossible.

This was my thinking process when reading Ars Technica's fascinating article about the Google stripping Google+ from everything in sight. Started in 2011 as a belated and somewhat panicked reaction to Facebook, it's frequently (and accurately) described as a ghost town. Google started this process with the rollout of the confusingly named Google Photos, which replaced the better and similarly-named Google+ Photos. Likes? Usable albums? Full size images? Who cares? It's almost as if Google had no interest in the quality of their offerings, and was run by some schizophrenic emperor with ADHD. As Ron Amadeo points out in Ars, it wasn't the first time Google torpedoed a much-used product in favor of something no one wanted: Google Reader, an RSS-driven blog aggregator, got killed in favor of the pointless and short-lived Google Buzz, which itself exited this veil for Google+ after only two years. Google Hangouts, their instant messaging app, "feels like one of the most unimportant and poorly backed products at the company" and is "so poorly supported that making fun of it has practically become a meme in the Android community". It echoes Microsoft in mobile telephones, a market they were never able to crack, as evidenced by a string of failed, short duration marriages. That included, most recently, a $7.6 billion writedown of its Nokia acquisition along with 7,800 layoffs. Making billion dollar bets is hard, but smaller bets are no easier, especially when neither are tied to your core competency.