Tim Cook gets put in the cold seat while 13 remains a popular number in Japan. And will Apple get coal in its stocking? If the NLRB has anything to say about it, yes.
A friendly game of softball
In a somewhat unexpected turn of events, Tim Cook appeared on Dua Lipa’s “At Your Service” podcast, forcing many an aging observer of Apple corporate maneuvering to say aloud “Whose what now?”
Cook started out by asserting that everyone at Apple believes 1 plus 1 equals 3 because, uh, something about teamwork. While cute, bad math is not exactly a thing you want to hear from the company making the A-Fib detector in your smartwatch.
It’s an at times interesting interview in which Lipa questions Cook on how Apple measures its carbon output, but it’s not exactly hard-hitting. And that’s fine: not every interview has to be straight out of Marathon Man.…
Designed from the ground up to protect your privacy, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari – stopping you from being followed by ads around the web. Along with respecting your privacy, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Apple released its annual holidaytime videofun thingy! Hooray!
Don’t read this until after you’ve watched it. (Note to Apple Watch users: if your device starts lighting up with emergency medical alerts while you’re watching, just ignore them. Your grinchy heart is just growing three sizes in response to holiday sentiment and the sensors are misinterpreting that data as atrial fibrillation.)
OK. Pretty cool short, eh? The lady is shooting stop-motion animation with her iPhone, apparently using an app on her MacBook that takes advantage of the iPhone 15 Pro’s ability to shoot pictures in tethered mode. Over the course of four minutes, warm fuzzies are had. Almost literally. It’s all neat stuff and I sincerely applaud everybody involved in its creation.
A couple of things bothered me about the short, though.
First: I wish someone at Apple would explain to me on the record why the lady’s boss wasn’t played by Paul Giamatti. It’s such a total Paul Giamatti role that if Apple had produced this short inside the EU, some regulatory agency or another would have required Apple to hire Giamatti for the gig, no substitutes. In 2008, when Samsung cloned the iPhone with so much fidelity that it lit the fuse for years of vicious lawsuits, Samsung didn’t do that job nearly as well as how well Apple cloned Paul Giamatti when they booked this other actor.
Second: Something about the lady’s behavior nagged at me. The feeling lingered all afternoon and it took me a while to figure out what the issue was.
The story is short and simple. A lady suffers under an abrasive, if not fully abusive, boss. She exorcises her workplace anger through the ancient Klingon blood rite known as “stop-motion needle-felt animation.”
If you think about it, that’s absolutely stone-cold. Imagine if, instead, she took out her frustrations about her boss by drawing single-panel comics on her iPad. Each of her fantasy scenarios of her boss being injured, and humiliated, and, overall, deliberately made to feel as if God has turned His gaze of love far away from him, would have taken her twenty minutes to draw, max.
But stop-motion animation? With needle-felted figures?
How many weeks did it take her to complete just one of those humiliating scenes? She designed and constructed dolls, props, and sets; she invested lots of money and ingenuity in doing the lighting and rigging; she animated each shot one painstaking frame at a time; and then did all of the editing.
You must agree with me that this is an utterly psychopathic amount of work. It’s very correct to witness this behavior and then fear for that man’s safety out in the real world.
I’ll also point out that one of the little things the boss did that annoyed and angered her was that he noticed that she was very late for work. He communicated his disappointment in a quick, low-key way that drew no attention from the rest of the office. Close examination of the previous scene reveals why she was late that morning: she’d gotten so wrapped up in her whole Torture My Boss By Wooly Proxy project that she’d lost all track of time. She didn’t even leave her house for the office until five minutes before nine.
This speaks poorly of her. But it’s not the thing about the short that nagged at me all afternoon. It was the weird and fitful role of empathy in the story.
Scene: the boss makes the rounds of the office. In a manner that could be described either as “self-conscious and awkward” or “exactly how Paul Giamatti would have played that scene,” he hands out personal holiday gifts to the entire staff. The lady unwraps an utterly charming Christmas stocking that her boss clearly knitted himself.
Next, she happens to spot him dining alone, in a restaurant otherwise filled with groups and couples celebrating the holiday.
These two experiences help to humanize the boss in the lady’s eyes. She softens. The short ends with her starting to regard the man with fresh empathy and understanding.
OK. That’s sweet. Really. For the purposes of a four-minute short, it’s an efficient and effective story arc.
But the story dismisses something of critical importance: why didn’t she humanize her boss before the she learned that he was a fellow fan of the fiber arts? The boss was deserving of empathy and understanding from birth, because he’s a felllow human being. And yet the lady began extending that dignity to him just recently, and only because she chanced to see him eating alone and then she pitied him.
She got there in the end, which we should celebrate, but if not for the fact that only the ineffable forces of the universe have the right to judge, I’d be giving her, like, a B. Plus a fun sticker, because it keeps everything positive.
The messaging here is weird. On a side note, I also wonder: is the root of the problem between these two a simple generational difference in emotional user interfaces?
The boss isn’t mean to her. OK: not holding the elevator for her is a jerk move. But overall, he just seems like one of those people who are closed-off with his feelings overall. That sort of thing can easily come across as gruff. But is there anything to the trope of Millennials and Gen-Z requiring consistent emotional affirmations in the workplace, forms of reassurance that their Boomer bosses aren’t equipped to dispense?
Well, whatever. Empathy is the point of today’s sermon. Empathy requires each of us to never ever forget that we should treat fellow humans like human beings and not human-shaped objects. No exceptions and no excuses.
Simple? Oh, sure. But holy cats, it’s hard to get a consistent grip on the thing, isn’t it? It’s easier to know that we’ve misplaced our empathy than it is to be sure of what we should do with it.
The struggle’s worth it, though. Empathy is hands-down our most significant and important function. God or whatever put us here to practice empathy, and also because He or whatever couldn’t figure out how to make a huge awesome island made out of fun colorful plastic show up in the middle of the ocean all on its own.
So when the lady in the “Fuzzy Feelings” video exercises her empathy only conditionally, after she comes to pity her boss (itself a form of dehumanization), it comes across as… well, not wrong, but definitely odd.
Empathy from the machine
I’ve given “Fuzzy Feelings” another close examination and I might have an explanation for all of this. The computers in the short are big clues. Obviously, the lady uses a sweet setup of Apple computers at home. At work, her desk seems to have a Windows machine. Whatever it is, it definitely isn’t anything manufactured by Apple. The keyboard and mouse are ergonomic, for a start.
Apple has a famous and somewhat silly policy about using its products as props in film: Macs and iPhones and iPads can never be in the hands of any of the bad guys. I’m not kidding. Apple is so fussy about this that one of my favorite recent movies had to resort to a downright comical piece of editing when the story required a bad guy to hand an iPad to a good guy.
So maybe the lady’s capacity for empathy is intact… but her ability to access it is influenced by her environments. When she’s in the office and her boss gives her a gentle rebuke for a legit HR infraction, her proximity to a Microsoft operating system influences her to choose a path of (needle-felted stop-motion) violence. When she’s at home, her heart is warmed by the benedictive greenhouse of Apple screens, and empathy blossoms. She performs a penance: the Needle-Felted Boss, which throughout its life had been a sinner in the eyes of a vengeful God and made to suffer daily judgments more fearful than he could comprehend, receives a new blessing from his Lord, in the form of a felty little dog.
Also a pair of replacement pants. That puppet was animated without his trousers for way more scenes than the need for shot-to-shot continuity would require.
Can we just agree that “Fuzzy Feelings” is a little bit weird?
[Andy Ihnatko is a contributor to WGBH Radio and co-host of MacBreak Weekly. He's written about technology for numerous publications, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Macworld, and MacUser.]
Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes, from the littlest kindergarteners to the world’s most valuable and powerful corporations. What’s most important is how we respond to our mistakes, of course. Do we learn and grow? Do we deny and deflect? Or do we just give up?
What I’m saying is, Apple sometimes takes its failures and learns important lessons that inform its future attempts… but sometimes, it seems to just give up.
Choosing between noise cancellation and excellent audio quality in headphones, the impact of an unlimited supply of one thing on the world or your life, the significance of Apple’s adoption of RCS, and recommendations for Black Friday deals.
The possibilities that Apple will release a lower-cost MacBook, Apple’s difficulties in building a 5G radio to rival Qualcomm, Apple attempts to appease the EU by adopting RCS, and all hell breaks loose with OpenAI.
The iOS 17.2 beta has brought the ability to shoot in Spatial Video for the forthcoming Vision Pro, and a handful of pressparticipated in a demo where they could view Spatial Video on the Vision Pro headset. While the stuff recorded by Apple with the cameras in the Vision Pro headset naturally had better stereo separation than the iPhone, most members of the press seemed impressed by the content taken from a device that’s far more likely to be available to capture memories. (I’m more than a little curious to see a demo like that myself, but I’d settle for some good sushi.)
Earlier this summer I gave a quick overview of stereoscopic terms and filmmaking. Part of that post had to do with guessing at what Spatial Video was. In Apple’s marketing materials, they show third-person vantages of people experiencing perfectly separated, holographic experiences of things, but the reality is that it has a lot more in common with the left-eye/right-eye combo of traditional stereoscopic video.…
Imagine, if you will, an avalanche of tens of billions of beans being spilled. Such is what happened in Google’s antitrust trial. There’s big news in little bubbles this week and social networking continues to be a huge mistake.
Cringe all the lawyers
After years of speculation, we finally know that Apple makes a lot of money.
See, now it makes sense why Apple doesn’t feel bad about taking 10 to 30 percent from developers. “Google gives us 36 percent of a metric crapton of money. You’re arguing about 30 percent of that little bit you make?”
It makes sense through a certain ridiculously wealthy lens.
In a delightful detail about this revelation, Bloomberg says Google’s economics expert, John Murphy, accidentally let this tidbit slip, causing Google attorney John Schmidtlein to “visibly cringe”. Both Google and Apple had been trying to keep this number a secret but now the multi-billion dollar cat is out of the bag.…
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Disney’s going to own all of Hulu. Does this uniquely position them to be the most legitimate challenger to Netflix? We also discuss the power of platforms, Apple’s “Napoleon” opportunity, and Disney’s Marvel experimentation.
Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.
Here’s what this means:
iPhone communications with Android devices via Messages will improve. Currently Messages uses the old SMS and MMS standards for sending texts and media to Android phones. RCS supports better image transfers, pass-along of location data (used in several Messages features), and more.
It might mean that these messages are more secure than they used to be, though the fundamental security of RCS as a protocol is a little hazy. Apple says it’ll work with the GSM Association to improve the standard, which might include security improvements? We’ll see.
It absolutely doesn’t mean that “green bubble shame” is going anywhere. There’s no way that Apple will promote RCS messages to blue bubbles in Messages. Not only does the blue bubble indicate that messages are from other Apple devices, it indicates that they’ve been sent securely using iMessage. It’s not just branding, it’s meaningful. It’s unclear if RCS messages will use green bubbles or some other color, but it won’t be iMessage blue for sure.
This is coming in a software update next year, so either a late iOS 17 update or iOS 18.
Why is Apple doing this? It sure feels like a way to indicate its support of open standards at a time when it’s being investigated by various bodies, most notably in the European Union. Who knows if it’ll work?
Either way, this is a good announcement. It’s hard to believe that Apple still falls back to SMS and MMS for all communications with Android devices. RCS isn’t a replacement for iMessage, but it will improve chats with Android users within Messages. This hasn’t just been a user experience problem for Android users, it’s been one for iPhone users who have Android users in their lives.
One year ago today, Apple’s groundbreaking safety service Emergency SOS via satellite became available on all iPhone 14 models in the U.S. and Canada. Now also available on the iPhone 15 lineup in 16 countries and regions, this innovative technology — which enables users to text with emergency services while outside of cellular and Wi-Fi coverage — has already made a significant impact, contributing to many lives being saved. Apple today announced it is extending free access to Emergency SOS via satellite for an additional year for existing iPhone 14 users.
Apple’s in an interesting position with this service. Even though its currently limited to emergency usage—which is hopefully a pretty small percentage of overall eligible iPhone users—satellite connectivity isn’t cheap.
I was pretty confident Apple would kick this can down the road, and now they have. My guess is that it might (next year or the year after) introduce a paid tier that lets you do more with satellite connectivity—non-emergency messaging, for example—and use a charge for that to essentially subsidize free emergency functionality for all users.
Yes, Apple wants to continue to make money on this, but it definitely doesn’t want to be in a position of having a customer unable to use the service because they didn’t pony up for the monthly cost—that would not be a great look in those “look at all the people who are still here to celebrate their birthday because of Apple technology” videos.
Artificial intelligence is the buzziest of buzzwords right now. But as rivals like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have gone full throttle on incorporating this latest hot technology into their products, Apple has taken a decidedly slower—if not uncharacteristic—approach that has more than a few critics lambasting the company for trailing behind its competitors.
Still, if rumors are to be believed, Apple is going hard at building generative AI features in its software updates over the next year. Naturally, most people’s attention will probably go to Siri as one place the company could benefit from integrating the sort of technology demoed by others, but there are definitely other places throughout Apple’s software platforms where AI could make as big an impact—if not bigger—on users’ lives.
