By Dan Moren

February 28, 2019 2:49 PM PT

The Back Page: I Fold (Phones)

So you saw the presentation on the Samsung Galaxy Fold and then you watched Huawei unveil the Mate X, and suddenly you all want to know when we here at Apple are going to make folding phones.

Folding. Phones.

Really? That’s what you want? I have to ask: What the hell is wrong with you people? We released a foldable phone five years ago, it was called the iPhone 6, and everybody screamed bloody murder.

Look, I’m sick and tired of people complaining that Apple is “falling behind” on every new “innovation” that other tech companies are trying to make happen. We didn’t miss smartwatches, we didn’t miss intelligent speakers, and we sure as hell didn’t miss smartphones. Okay, we may have missed intelligent speakers a little bit.

But not every single little thing that other companies trot out is worth spending our time and money on. We’re here to make the hard choices for you, because god knows you’re too distracted by shiny newness to do so. Did we really miss out on head-mounted displays? You wanted one of those creepy Google Glasses to wear everywhere? Because we could have done it, but we didn’t, because nobody wants to have to stare at people wearing cameras on their faces and staring at screens because they’re more interested than the latest YouTube video then your conversation about your kids. You’re welcome.

At Apple, we don’t just blindly follow the latest whims or so-called “trends.” If we had a nickel for every time some analyst said that we were doomed to failure because we had “missed out” on some product category, we would have amassed approximately $235 million, which we would then have donated entirely to charity because we already have so much more money than that it’s ridiculous.

What’re you going to say we missed next? I have to ask. Should we be building electric scooters? Boxing up meal delivery kits? Making our own video-streaming service? … Okay, that last one’s not half bad. Anyway, my point is, we don’t just do what everybody else is doing. If all your friends launched themselves into space, would you follow them? No, seriously, I’m asking, because there are a lot of billionaires building rockets.

So, no, the existence of foldable phones doesn’t mean we’re automatically going to start making them, no matter what patent filings you’ve uncovered. (Look, we let Fred patent a lot of stuff. It makes him feel useful. Keep it up, Fred.) Foldable phones goes way down on the list, below all the other stupid things people have demanded we make, like toaster-fridge laptops with touchscreens and smart fabrics with nano-materials and a FireWire-based audio breakout box. We’ve almost cracked that last one.

Basically we’re very busy, and you can either have a foldable phone or an electric miracle car. Or laptop keyboards that work. One of those. You pick.

Hey, building smartphones is hard and making them foldable isn’t even in the top ten things that we’re interested in. Because we’re not making tacos, we’re making phones, and as everybody made abundantly clear in 2014, phones aren’t supposed to bend. You want a folding phone, go find yourself a Motorola StarTAC. Enjoy surfing the web on that. We’ll be right here, not folding our phones.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

February 28, 2019 2:48 PM PT

Applications Folder: The Unarchiver

File compression! It’s not sexy, it’s not new, but it’s still something we all deal with, even in this day and age of superfast Internet connections and terabytes of storage. But I still remember all too well the heady days of the ‘90s, when downloading anything off a bulletin board or the nascent Internet meant relying on that old chestnut, StuffIt Expander, and working with .SIT files, binhexing, and so on.

These days, of course, file compression is built right into macOS, with the ability to zip and unzip files directly accessible via the Finder. And for most people, that’s probably enough.

But every once in a while, I run across something for which macOS’s built-in compression capabilities aren’t quite sufficient. In those eventualities, I have for years turned to The Unarchiver. In addition to handling your standard ZIP files, The Unarchiver can accommodate a ton of other compression and archiving formats, like RAR, gzip, tar, and even those old StuffIt files you might have lying around.

I don’t find myself using The Unarchiver that much, but when I do, it’s critical. Recently I was downloading a compressed virtual machine for a project, and the instructions were adamant that the file could not be decompressed with macOS’s standard tools, since it would end up extracting the VM in the wrong format. (Sure enough, the first time I downloaded it, I missed this fact, and ended up with something my VM software couldn’t read. Which meant downloading the multi-gig file all over again.) The Unarchiver, though, dealt with it with aplomb.

In fact, I’ve never run into a file format that The Unarchiver can’t handle. It’s not a piece of software that has much in the way of user interface. Its preferences let you choose which archiving formats it’s the default system handler for, as well as how to treat the resulting files and the original archives. But frankly, that’s all The Unarchiver really needs to do. It’s the kind of tool that doesn’t get in your way, just does its job quietly and unremarkably. And, best of all, it’s free.

So really, there’s no reason not to install The Unarchiver. You might never need it, but if you do, you’ll be glad you have it.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

February 28, 2019 2:48 PM PT

We Like: Fixing things!

I hear so much these days about how we live in a disposable society, and to a certain extent that’s true. Many of our devices aren’t designed to be repaired by the owners, whether it’s a smartphone or a car. And yet some devices still are repairable… and in the last few years I’ve come to love the combination of repairable products and the Internet.

A year or so ago my washing machine stopped draining and flooded a portion of my garage, which is where I work! It was not good. Fortunately the flood didn’t get too far, and we sopped it up with towels and ran fans, but we were left with the problem of a washing machine that didn’t work. (We ended up spending a few weeks clothes to the local laundromat, washing them there, then carting them home sopping wet to dry them in our still-functional dryer.)

We called local appliance repair people, all of whom heard the brand name of our washing machine and refused to perform service. More distant repair people in our region, including one that had previously serviced this machine, also refused. One said they could fit us in if we would wait about six weeks.

We got so frustrated that we decided we were just going to give up and buy a new washing machine—one that we could get reliably serviced by a local repair person. And that moment took me off the hook. Now I knew that if I broke our existing machine by attempting to fix it myself, it was no big deal—we were replacing it anyway. So why not try?

Like our disposable society, there are lots of things that are bad about the Internet. But you know what’s not bad about the Internet? You can search for just about any repairable device in your home and find multiple YouTube videos that show you, in detail, how to repair them. When I diagnosed that my washing machine had a failed pump motor, I was able to search for a replacement part—the Internet’s also full of sites that will ship you parts—and using YouTube guidance, open up my washing machine and replace the pump. It took maybe an hour. It cost me my time and 20 or 30 bucks for the replacement pump. And just like that, our washing machine was functional again.

I’ve repeated this same approach with replacing a car stereo, fixing a broken rack in my dishwasher, replacing a broken drawer in our refrigerator, and replacing a snapped-off handle and an ancient cutting blade on my lawnmower. (We bought the lawnmower 20 years ago and it’s still chugging away.)

The other week my weather station, which I’ve written about here and has been in service in my backyard for 15 years, stopped reporting rainfall totals. I sighed and started pricing new weather stations, until I realized that I could buy a replacement rain sensor, take the thing apart, and put it back together. I did that two days ago, for about one-tenth the cost of replacing the entire weather station.

So what do I like? I like the Internet providing me with replacement parts and instructional repair videos, yes. But I also like the feeling I get in knowing that when something breaks, I don’t need to throw myself on the mercy of a local appliance repair shop and write them a large check. I can, in my instances, fix it myself. Before the Internet the entire idea would’ve been ludicrous, but now it’s routine.