On November 10, 2020, Apple announced new architecture models of their MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and their Mac mini. They are based upon the highly anticipated Apple-designed microprocessor, which we learned Apple has named the M1 — the first, entry level version of their Macintosh microprocessor. As expected, based upon the processing power of the Apple chips in the iPad and iPhone, these are very fast, very efficient chips. It is characteristic of such Apple presentations that there is a lot of razzle-dazzle, but they don't mention drawbacks. I was looking forward to a much improved Mac mini. However, in a close look at its specifications, I was disappointed. The new mini has conspicuous shortcomings:
The 12 Pro offers superlative photographic capabilities, and employs a new image stabilization technique where it can move the lower-mass imaging sensor around, rather than the lens assembly — but note that this chip-based stabilization is only in Wide mode: Telephoto mode uses standard optical image stabilization, despite needing maximum stabilization in this mode. You'll have to anchor your 12 Pro to a tripod or the like to achieve satisfactory telephoto shots.
One of the biggest surprises with iPhone 12 was MagSafe. I marveled that they were able to add this to a phone that was already this thin. An irony is that MagSafe — in an alternate meaning of the word "safe" — was on earlier MacBook computers, so that someone tripping over the charging cord would just dislodge the connector from the MacBook and not yank your expensive laptop computer off the table top. This was "safe" as in "safety", and went away with the modern USB connectors. With iPhone 12, "safe" is as in "keeping your valuables in a safe", where you can have a credit card pouch magnetically bond to the back of your device.
To keep the world from being deluged with phone chargers and earbuds, the iPhone 12 box does not include a power adapter or earbuds. Good riddance, I say: I never use either, where I dock my iPhone to a clock radio that has a Lightning connector, and can't abide earbuds being stuck into my ears. On the subject: A big surprise was that iPhone 12 retains the Lightning connector, and did not go to USB-C as many were expecting. I'm pleased with that.
This episode can only galvanize Apple's resolve to design their own radio technology chips so that in the future they are never again at the mercy of a supplier like Qualcomm.
Whenever I think of Siri, I can't help but think back to the earlier days of Apple, when the company was especially visionary and was imagining what it could bring to the future; and in that I think of the Knowledge Navigator. This was Apple's 1987-1988 vision for a comprehensive, very capable assistant, as imagined by then CEO John Sculley. (See videos on YouTube.) Its concept remains as wonderful today as it was then, portraying a wholly natural voice and video-based interaction between man and machine, greatly enhancing what the human could accomplish. At the same time, it's all very sad, for here we are 30 years later and Apple hasn't provided more than a small fraction of that capability. It's particularly disappointing because Apple as a company has immense resources in design and fabrication which could have been used to bring the Knowledge Navigator to fruition — and with that be far ahead of its rivals. This failure to act on vision will go down as one of Apple's greatest failings and lost opportunities.
There's also a large irony in all this: Apple is believed to be working on autonomous driving automobile technology. If the AI in that is as inadequate as the AI in Siri, then Apple's vehicle autonomy will not be viable.
In committing to this approach, Apple is doing two things: (1) Allowing Apple to provide features, efficiency, power, battery life, and performance that they can't get by adopting someone else's generic microprocessor. (2) Apple all but eliminates the encumbrances involved in the licensed patents and associated fees in using other companies' microprocessors. The egregious fees that Qualcomm has been charging Apple is incentivising Apple to make their own cellular radio processors. Further, Intel's processor bungles and years-late development has given Apple reason to put their own processors into Macintoshes (much like Apple had to give up on IBM and the PowerPC for lack of initiative by their partner company).
Apple is now a huge semiconductor company in its own right, designing processors that enable them to bring forth innovative products that would not be possible if they had to depend upon other, tepidly interested microprocessor companies.
After having used the Apple TV 4K box a couple of months, I went to use it again and, instead of working, the white light on the front was blinking and what was on the screen was a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in it, and under that the terse: support.apple.com/appletv/restore. I went to that website which, for the 4K box, said to call Apple Support: just that, no other remediation. I underwent that protracted exercise. Speaking with the technical support person, I was told that there was no way that a customer could address this problem themself: the box has to be returned to Apple, either by mail or by going to the nearest Apple Store.
You've got to be kidding me! This is appallingly bad engineering, where there is no way provided for a customer to reset the unit: the customer has to go through an ordeal of physically transporting the box to Apple for them to do something. Nonsense like this is precisely why Apple is becoming a joke in the industry. If you look back to the previous generation box, there was a USB-C connector on the back, where the 'restore' website provided instructions for connecting that to a Mac to reset the unit via iTunes. The 4K box was designed without a USB connector, and no thought was given to allowing for resetting via an operation through the ethernet port or by providing a reset button on the unit. What causes this? My suspicion is the standard setting for automatic updating of the software in the box, where there is a gross defect in the firmware such that the normal un-powering the unit after a watching session results in the box getting fatally screwed up when it is in the midst of updating itself. I've provided Apple with my feedback on this unacceptably bad situation.
My strong advice is to avoid this lemon of a product, unless you want to go through this same masochistic experience.
HomePod has some native functionality appeal of its own. It has become a cliche for people to struggle to hear phone calls over tiny speakers where intelligibility suffers and the overall experience is unsatisfactory. What you'd like is a device with multiple, sensitive microphones and high quality sound reproduction to be able to engage in a satisfying phone conversation with friends or family members. HomePod does that, well. Beyond that, the "Hey, Siri" experience at home with an iPhone or iPad is not the most satisfying in terms of audio. HomePod will fix that — but of course will not fix the overall Siri shortcoming of referring you to online information rather than directly giving you information you seek.
As to music: Apple has clarified that HomePod will not just play content from your Apple Music subscription: it will play your iTunes-purchased music as well, plus Beats 1 streaming, and podcasts. As you would expect, other music services are not supported in HomePod. There is no Bluetooth support: pushing to the device requires AirPlay 2.
HomePod is not meant to be a stand-alone device, but rather one that adds value when combined with other Apple devices and services in their ecosystem.
One thing that I haven't seen anyone else consider is that HomePod might be an element of Apple's AR strategy, surreptitiously positioning itself in the home for more than the music playing it suggests. The HomePod is designed with six microphone beamforming technology that allows it to determine the position of the user relative to the device.
This is a good case example of Apple choosing to fail. One can imagine that the developers and management team within Apple were well aware, since inception, that AirDrop was highly problematic and would be unreliable for probably most of their customers, and yet Apple went ahead and promoted it as though it was a wonderful and completely reliabile facility. Moreover, they knew that Apple either would not be able to fix the problems with AirDrop, or that the company would never thereafter allocate the resources to fix it, as staff time would instead be fully allocated to go-forward projects. Suffice to say that AirDrop is one of those things that Apple has chosen to ignore and abandon in place, even though they've continue to include it in MacOS and iOS as though it was a viable facility.
What could Apple have done differently? First, they should not have released AirDrop, knowing full well that it would function properly only in very limited circumstances. In having released it, knowing its limitations, Apple should have incorporated self-debugging software into the facility, to tell the user what's wrong when the user attempts to use it, rather than the facility being completely silent as it continues to be today. Further, if Apple really cared about the quality of their software, they would force their developers to depend upon the software they write: nothing motivates the fixing of applications like its creators having to use it. And lastly: now that Apple is very much into AI, they have the overall opportunity to generally make their OS facilities much smarter about handling situations where things aren't right.
Apple is notorious for not fixing problems for current usage. What they do — if they address software problems at all — is develop corrections into the next release, that will come out next year. This is conscious neglect, leaving problems unaddressed for their current users, which results in a lot of dissatisfaction that Apple seems to not care about. This needs to stop. Apple needs to acknowledge problems, and devote resources to fix problems. Apple is well known to have one of the largest workforces in the world, distributed all over the globe, and have enormous amounts of unallocated cash. To ignore users' problems smacks of self-enriching arrogance. Apple: do you really want that to be your reputation?
This is a demoralizing deal-breaker, making for yet another black eye for Apple in a lackluster year where they instead need to maintain their standing. Clearly, Apple is engaging in their usual practice of pitting suppliers against one another in order to get the best component pricing; but that's something done to benefit Apple's income figures and executive bonuses, not the customer. This is betrayal of trust with the customer, shortchanging performance and hoping the customer won't realize it. Apple is supposed to be the pre-eminent smartphone maker, offering premium devices with the best materials and performance. Instead, we find Apple marketing diminished products at premium prices. Among other things, this is dismaying, reflecting Apple just not caring. I would further imagine that this is demoralizing for Apple product designers, who would want to put the best available components into devices they labor over for a year, only to be told by profit-oriented managers to create a device that is inferior to what it could and should be.
I had been contemplating upgrading to an iPhone 7. No longer. I'll be sticking with my iPhone 6 Plus, waiting to see what the iPhone 8 offers. Perhaps if Apple sees what their perverse game-playing is doing to their bottom line, they will wake up from their indifference.
Addendum: Around January 20, 2017, Apple filed a $1B suit against Qualcomm for "excessive royalties" and withholding payments in retaliation for Apple cooperating with South Korean regulators that are investigating the chip supplier. Apple is fed up with Qualcomm's extortionary practices, where Apple is forced to pay Qualcomm some 3 to 4% of the bill of materials of the entire iPhone in order to use the CDMA technology that is the basis for one chip in the phone. Apple also says that Qualcomm hides behind a "thicket" of more than 30,000 patents to "extort" royalties. Apple's lawsuit reads: "By leveraging the 'thicket,' Qualcomm attempts to avoid the patent-by-patent analysis that is ordinarily required for any licensing demand, instead hiding behind the sheer volume of its patent portfolio to extort royalties from potential licensees." Qualcomm's business model can be characterized as excessively greedy. Analysts have found that business model to be unrealistic and unsustainable — a finding corroborated by South Korea fining Qualcomm $890 million for monopolistic tactics, and an FTC complaint charging Qualcomm with using anticompetitive tactics to maintain its monopoly in the supply of a key semiconductor device used in cell phones and other consumer products. Qualcomm's business model can be characterized as excessively greedy. Analysts have found that business model to be unrealistic and unsustainable — a finding corroborated by South Korea fining Qualcomm $890 million for monopolistic tactics, and an FTC complaint charging Qualcomm with using anticompetitive tactics to maintain its monopoly in the supply of a key semiconductor device used in cell phones and other consumer products. Qualcomm's stock has suffered as a result of all this.
Compounding the problem was that many retailers rolled the technology out in phases, where the PoS devices were in place but only for card-swiping, where the chip reader was present but whose use was in some way discouraged — sometimes via tape crudely applied over the reader slot, or having the reader slot exposed but the clerk telling the customer not to use it. Lots of confusion through inconsistency.
So, once the new technology was implemented, all is find and dandy, huh? No. Retailers and customers quickly learned that use of the chip reader resulted in greatly prolonged transactions, where it commonly takes about 10 times longer for the chip reader method to process than the former swipe method. Some retailers who had implemented the chip readers before Christmas turned it off for the duration of the holiday period to prevent long, frustrated lines of customers at the checkout. While the new PoS devices all have shrouded keypads for entering the PIN that the technology calls for, almost no retailers implemented PIN as the second factor: the decades-old, much less secure signature method prevailed. All of the above spells an ugly mess. Faster PoS devices and processing are being promised, but with further expenses for the retailers.
If there was ever an experiential incentive for the use of Apple Pay, this is it. I was in line behind a person checking out with a chip-read card, where the process took over a minute. When my turn came, I used my iPhone with Apple Pay, where the process took less than a second: a far better experience, much more secure to boot.
Why was Apple so stubborn? I think it was partly because they approached it on the basis of historic success that Steve Jobs had with music companies, movie studios, and book and magazine publishers, where he was able to exercise Apple's clout in convincing those content providers to participate in the Apple ecosystem. But I think there was more, as well. Never forget that a huge element of the motivations of Apple people is that they approach products and services as consumers, which in real life they are. They want good, quality stuff, and it irks them to have to contend with a lot of the crud that is in the consumer space. It's well known to everyone that TV content purveyors have little respect for the end user: the number of commercial minutes has increased over the years to about 1/4 of air time, and if that weren't enough, they overlay programs we are trying to watch with all kinds of logos, banners, and animations promoting upcoming shows. There is little reason that Apple should have more respect for content providers who deface their product than the content providers have for their audiences.
Recognizing this reality, Google and Apple for some time have had a contractual relationship where, according to leaks, Google pays Apple about a billion dollars a year to be the default search engine on iOS Safari. For this to make sense, Google obviously has to benefit to an income far exceeding that number. (In 2014, Goldman Sachs estimated that more than 75 percent of Google's mobile revenue was coming from i-devices.) That income derives from the top-of-search-results paid links to sites which are more or less related to the conducted search.
This is a double-edged sword for both parties. While Apple derives some income from this arrangement, it means financing your competitor. For Google, this means depending upon your competitor, who could stop renewing your contract and cut you out of a huge part of the mobile realm. As to the latter risk, Apple has been progressively undercutting Google, first by continuing the expansion of Siri voice-based searching, and secondarily through further development for Spotlight searches to go directly out to the Internet to service queries. This is extending into Apple Maps as well, where you can search for stores or restaurants or movies within Maps, and also bring up partnered review sites (e.g., Yelp) info on those businesses. Consider also the Reader function in the Safari browswer, which allows you to see just the article on a page and skip all the egregious advertising debris. Apple is doing this, not to be mean, but out of a combination of the basic principle of not helping your competitors compete against you, and in rejection of Google's business model of collecting and effectively selling information about millions of people's buying interests. (See Apple's privacy statement.) Note further that Apple is not the only company implicitly threatening Google's principle source of income: one can just go to the Amazon site to search and find just about any product, within their walls.
All of this points out how Google's business model was based upon an opportunity which was wide open for exploitation during the early Internet, but which has always been very vulnerable to being pushed aside as things evolved. Google recognizes all this, which is likely what caused them to reorganize the company under umbrella name Alphabet, with Google being one of held companies, where they hope the other companies are able to grow and produce sizeable income.
In the spring of 2014, Apple acquired Beats Electronics and Beats Music in a $3 billion deal. Apple provided insight on this, saying that this was largely to have the Beats founders join Apple, namely Interscope-Geffen-A&M chairman Jimmy Iovine and hip-hop producer Dr. Dre, where their industry weight and influence would allow Apple to make greater strides. Apple made the move because they had failed to properly gauge the popularity of music streaming, which was overwhelming digital music purchases much as digital music purchasing had done to CDs, and needed a jumpstart into the music streaming business. In that effort, Apple expected Iovine and Dre to greatly assist with negotiations with music companies.
When the Beats purchase was announced, I was astounded how much Apple was overpaying for a company whose Beats Music service Apple should have been able to out-do themselves, after a decade of experience with iTunes and all the in-house talent they had. This acquisition also saddled Apple with a dubious headphone and portable speakers product line which though it had some following, largely consisted of non-audiophile-quality headsets. Worse, the products were not necessarily well designed, as witness the embarrassing recall of the Beats Pill XL Speaker, which posed a fire safety risk. The acquisition also resulted in a lawsuit against Beats (and thus Apple) from Monster regarding the way in which the Beats sale was engineered by Iovine and Dre, shutting Monster out of participatory compensation.
Did Iovine and Dre really bring music industry acumen to Apple? In anticipation of launching Apple Music, Apple decided that they would introduce their new service with a free three month trial — during which they would not be paying artists! This is to say that Apple would effectively be building its business with slave labor. This was an astounding, unfathomable, collosal error in judgement which resulted in a tremendous loss of faith in Apple and artists backlash. Agitated into writing a 4 a.m. open letter, Taylor Swift took Apple to task, saying "I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company. ... We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation." Apple was casting itself as an arrogant corporation which, despite repeatedly saying "Music is in our DNA", was doing as they pleased with those who produce what Apple markets. Over that weekend, Apple executives were compelled to rethink their stance. On Sunday, June 21, 2015 senior VP of Internet Software and Service Eddy Cue capitulated for Apple, saying that Apple had reversed its intentions and would pay artists for content played through Apple Music during the free trial period. The elephant question here is how such a bone-headed decision could have been made in the first place if Iovine and Dre were the music industry insiders they claimed to be, and were as influential within Apple as their incorporation suggested.
If Apple was ready to make this obviously wrong decision, I have to wonder if the company is headed down a path of further misjudgements, with an accompanying decline toward irrelevance.
iOS 9:
The exciting thing here was in multiple on-screen applications, in the form
of SlideOver and and SplitView, for the iPad.
(Takes a lot of horsepower, so is for only the latest iPad.)
A brainstorm new feature is the ability to use the keyboard area of a
typing-oriented app as a trackpad, for quick moving around plus copy/paste.
watchOS 2.0:
This is rather like watching the evolution of the iPhone OS from its beginnings.
With 2.0, various apps can be native on the wrist device rather than being fed
from the iPhon.
watchOS is becoming much more sophisticated, laying the groundwork for next
year's redesigned watch.
Maps:
Long-awaited mass transit maps are being introduced, with much apparent
sophistication and value.
This derives from the transit mapping companies that Apple purchased.
CarPlay:
The novel thing here was the Car app that Apple engineered.
This represents a kind of inversion...
CarPlay's initial presence has been as a sub-area of your vehicle's display and
menus system, where you leave CarPlay to return to performing car functions.
The Car app is likely going to make it possible to stay on the CarPlay screen
and make vehicle functions something that is under that.
Apple Music:
This is Apple entering the music streaming market, as subscription music is
where the bulk of popular music listening has shifted.
iTunes has been merged into this.
The streaming is essentially the Beats Music service, re-engineered.
On stage, it was introduced by Jimmy Iovine, who joined Apple as Apple purchased
Beats Music for about $3 billion a while back.
Jimmy seemed to be out of his league, with a very awkward presentation: it gave
the impression that he was being put on stage to introduce him to the Apple
community, more than to convey information.
It seems that Apple brought in Jimmy and Andre Romelle Young (Dr. Dre) for their
sense of the music industry and contacts therein.
The multi-person presentation was lacking sophistication, causing for concern as
to the level to which all of this is playing.
What didn't show up:
Next generation Apple TV box and broadcast service:
Indications are that the hardware wasn't quite ready for WWDC, and
negotiations with content providers are still ongoing.
This was a huge omission, resulting in a perceptible void in the presentation,
being rather embarrassing as well given the Apple TV box shape in the middle of
the invitation image (title: "The epicenter of change").
New Apple TV technology was very obviously supposed to have been the core of the
event, but was wholly absent.
Enhanced maps:
Maps has largely been unchanged since it was introduced.
Tim Cook was publicly disappointed in what was introduced, as being inadequate
and not up to Apple standards.
Since then, users have not seen substantial improvements.
We do know that Apple has been endeavoring to improve business locationing
on the maps, which still needs work, as so many businesses and point of interest
remain unlabeled on the maps.
Over the past year, it has been discovered that Apple has had vans festooned
with recording equipment plying the streets of major metropolitan areas, where
we expect street view capability to be coming.
Hopefully, improvements to 3-D rendering can be improved, toward eliminating the
buildings and landscape distortions that are seen in current map views that were
generated from a series of photos taken from low-flying aircraft, circling over
metropolitan areas.
In the past, a "starvation" situation like this has been caused by staff being marshalled to work on some other major effort, which required many people. With the size of Apple's workforce, you would not expect this kind of reassignment to be necessary, though.
See the Apple QuickFacts reference